#13 Golden Age of Hollywood Series
One of the most popular pre-code storylines was that of a beautiful young woman who seduces unsuspecting men in a calculated effort to raise her station in life by becoming his well-kept mistress. If the gold digger is clever enough and persistent, she may even find herself a rich man’s wife.
In Baby Face, Barbara Stanwyck is deliciously calculating as Lily Powers, a woman who begins life ruthlessly exploited by men until she turns the tables and learns to use men to get what she wants.
It’s a great film, and no one could’ve played it better than Stanwyck. Her deep, non-nonsense voice and the cold look in her eyes tells you these poor saps never had a chance.
The film opens in her father’s seedy speakeasy, where Lily serves beer to shirtless and sweaty men who constantly manhandle her. Her father takes money from a man for sex with Lily, and it’s clear it isn’t the first time.
The whole film is worth watching just for the opening scene. No shrinking violet, Lily fends the men off with cutting remarks and even smashes one overzealous john over the head with an empty beer bottle. Still she cannot escape the grim circumstances of her life.
When her father dies in an accident, Cragg, an elderly cobbler and her only male friend, encourages her to use her beauty and looks to gain power over men.
She moves to the city and gets an office job by sleeping with the boss’ assistant. Soon she’s moved up to the boss, then his boss, and then his boss. The movie uses a great visual of showing the outside of the office, tracking higher and higher up the building as Lily literally “sleeps her way to the top.”
While Lily Powers is motivated by desperation, the Red-Headed woman’s Lil “Red” Andrews is simply after mischief.
It was a role Jean Harlow was born to play.
Harlow’s career began with Howard Hughes, playing Helen, the promiscuous girlfriend of Roy in Hell’s Angels. Fame grew as she played highly sexual mob molls, most famously in The Public Enemy.
But Harlow found her stride in Red-Headed Woman, her first headlining role.
Unlike Baby Face, Red-Headed Woman is played as burlesque, an outrageous farce of the gold digger trope. Red is a shameless maneater, going as far as to lock her prey in a room with him so he can’t escape her seductions.
The tone suited Harlow’s style perfectly. Harlow was a young, curvy, beautiful woman who oozed sex. But her voice didn’t match her body—you expect a husky seductive tone, like Stanwyck, or Lauren Bacall, or even Jessica Rabbit.
But when she talks, she sounds more like a gum-cracking truck stop waitress.
There’s a playfulness to her sexuality that previewed the screwball comedy.
And in the hands of the right screenwriter, that combination is magic.
Unfortunately, F. Scott Fitzgerald was not the right screenwriter. The famous author did not have nearly the success in Hollywood as he had as a Great American Novelist. Writing scripts takes a very different skill set than writing novels, and very few can master both. The novelist has complete freedom over the world and is the sole voice (at least until his editor sees the first draft). The novelist has a comparatively long time to complete the work and fewer structural rules.
In contrast, the screenwriter (especially in the 1930s) worked under tight deadlines, sometimes writing or rewriting scripts over a weekend. There is constant feedback from multiple sources, a strict structure, and the work of many writers is ultimately cobbled together to form the finished product.
For a legendary novelist like Fitzgerald, it can feel like a major demotion.
So for all his literary brilliance, Fitzgerald could not capture the humor and wit producer Irving Thalberg wanted for Red-Headed Woman, and he called in Anita Loos, his ace in the bullpen that could always get the job done.
Anita Loos could do it all. In her long career, she worked on over a hundred film scripts. She also wrote for Broadway, as well as having multiple fiction and nonfiction works published.
She had a particular talent for writing the sexual innuendo-laced female dialogue that Thalberg wanted for Red-Headed Women.
Once Loos fixed the script—which was really a complete rewrite, Thalberg knew it had a winner.
Red-Headed Woman is a zany delight, filled with physical comedy that borders on slapstick and a script that zings as Red steals away one husband before going after another, and falling in love with a third.
The best part?
She gets away with it.
No moment of repentance, no promise to change her ways, no seeing the light through true love.
Instead, we see Red in the back of a limousine, with the rich husband who bankrolls her lifestyle and the man she loves chauffeuring the car.
Who says a woman can’t have it all?
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