Warners and MGM seemed to be in a competition as to who could make the raunchiest movie and get away with it. Warner's BABY FACE wins because, despite the language and innuendo here, Stanwyck shows more, does more, and enjoys more in her pre-code masterpiece than Harlow; MGM might talk a good game, and have Anita Loos to write the words "Hit me again, I like it", but Stanwyck lets us know how tough she is by being smarter about it, by knowing that everyone cheats to win, and never expects anyone to play by the rules.
Not that Harlow is any slouch, particularly as this movie is a comedy, and her craftiness is tempered with stupidity; having won a victory, she thinks she has won the war of the sexes. She's good as a comedienne for the same actors who play villains regularly are. No one thinks of himself as a sex god or goddess, and people who play villains know it is all an act, and the two-backed beast, as Iago noted, is the silliest-looking thing around.
Therein lies the hypocrisy of the moralists who decried movies like this. Their reasoning seems to have been that without movies like this to instruct them, no woman would think about sleeping her way to the top; and that having done so, her destruction would not eventuate. Collette would disagree.
It certainly doesn't hurt that Henry Stephenson is so good in this movie, and Una Merkel as Harlow's equally dumb friend is the perfect pre-code companion. This one is no masterpiece, but it's good, unclean fun.
Not that Harlow is any slouch, particularly as this movie is a comedy, and her craftiness is tempered with stupidity; having won a victory, she thinks she has won the war of the sexes. She's good as a comedienne for the same actors who play villains regularly are. No one thinks of himself as a sex god or goddess, and people who play villains know it is all an act, and the two-backed beast, as Iago noted, is the silliest-looking thing around.
Therein lies the hypocrisy of the moralists who decried movies like this. Their reasoning seems to have been that without movies like this to instruct them, no woman would think about sleeping her way to the top; and that having done so, her destruction would not eventuate. Collette would disagree.
It certainly doesn't hurt that Henry Stephenson is so good in this movie, and Una Merkel as Harlow's equally dumb friend is the perfect pre-code companion. This one is no masterpiece, but it's good, unclean fun.