Though John Wayne is immediately associated with Westerns and war movies, he was, surprisingly, in a 90-year-old sex drama that was so shocking at the time that it completely rewrote Hollywood’s censorship laws. Though most tend to think of his career in the era of the 1950s-60s, Wayne’s Hollywood career started much earlier than that. His first feature film, Men Without Women, came all the way back in 1930, but it wasn’t until 1939’s Stagecoach that he really broke out and became a mainstream star.
John Wayne made his name in Westerns and the war genre, but he did occasionally branch out into other genres. One of those times resulted in a movie that was so controversial, it prompted Hollywood to overhaul its censorship laws. Though John Wayne had a small part in the movie, he’s still part of Hollywood history for reasons completely unrelated to his Western roles.
25-Year-Old John Wayne Played A Lover In The Notorious 1933 Movie Baby Face
Long before his breakout role, however, John Wayne’s first lead role, The Big Trail (1931), bombed. For the next few years, he was only given small roles, which is how he came to play a small part in the 1933 movie Baby Face. The movie follows Barbara Stanwyck’s Lily Powers, a young bartender in a speakeasy who is tired of being sexually exploited by men all her life. She decides to flip the tables and figures that if men can do it, she can do it, too. Using her looks and sex appeal, she seduces the rich male workers of a powerful bank in the same building as her speakeasy to unrepentantly seduce her way to the top.
A young John Wayne played Jimmy McCoy, a low-level manager at the bank. He becomes Lily’s lover for a brief time, but after he gets her a job at the bank, she leaves him for someone higher up the bank’s food chain. In one humorous exchange, an oblivious Jimmy complains that he no longer sees Lily, unaware that her nights are now being taken up with another man. She brushed him off explaining that she was just working so hard every day at the bank that she had to go to bed early, hence the sudden cooling of their affair.
How Baby Face Influenced Hollywood’s Strict Enforcement Of The Production Code
At the time, Baby Face set out to titillate and get people talking, and it certainly achieved that goal. The movie was marketed to be provocative, with the cheeky headline “She had it and made it pay” causing quite a stir. Made during the Pre-Code Hollywood era, Baby Face was one of the films that actually brought about an end to that same era. While it’s considered a classic today, Baby Face’s frank discussion of sex, and especially female sexuality, was responsible for a fair bit of the pearl-clutching that led to the revision and enforcement of the Production Code.
The Pre-Code era was the short bit of time (1927-1934) between the widespread proliferation of pictures with sound and the revision and enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines, more infamously known as the Hays Code. The movies of the era were experimental and unbound in their depictions of what were considered “taboo” subjects by more conservative and white-centric groups, including interracial marriage, drug use, sex, abortion, homosexuality, and more, including the promiscuity and female sexual empowerment featured in Baby Face.
Roman Catholic groups in the United States waged a campaign against what they saw as illicit and immoral behavior being depicted on screen, and soon, studios grew worried that the government would step in. As such, studio producers came together to agree to greater oversight from a third party. Thus, the Pre-Code era of Hollywood came to an end and strict, ultra-conservative regulations were enforced.
Baby Face’s Uncensored Version Was Finally Recovered & Released In 2004
After the Hays Code was passed, the Hays Office demanded that Baby Face be pulled from distribution and ordered extensive cuts and changes to be made in order to pass the standards of the new code. A number of minor changes were made to the film in the name of censorship, but the two biggest changes were the ending and the role of the cobbler. In the new, censored version of the film, Lily loses everything and is forced to return to her hometown, sending the message that her sexual promiscuity led to her downfall.
As for the cobbler’s role in the original Baby Face, he had a strong Nietzschean bent in his final speech, telling Lily that she was a strong woman who could get anything she wants by using men. In fact, he encourages her to do so, pointing out that all of life is exploitation and she might as well use it to her advantage. In the censored version, his speech comes with a heaping helping of moralizing, telling Lily there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to do it.
The original uncensored version of Baby Face disappeared and was thought to be lost forever until it was discovered in a vault in Dayton, Ohio belonging to the U.S. Library of Congress in 2004. Credit for the discovery went to Mike Mashon, curator at the Motion Picture Division of the Library of Congress, who was charged with making a new print of the film for the upcoming London Film Festival.
Mashon discovered there was a second film negative of the movie, and when technicians compared the two film copies of Baby Face, they discovered one was five minutes longerโthey had found the original, uncensored cut of the film. The restored original was released at the London Film Festival later that year. In 2005, the original cut of Baby Face, John Wayne’s most controversial movie, was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry.