Movie Reviews

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For decades, Baby Face -- the 1933 fi lm starring Barbara Stanwyck -- has been preCode 101. If you want to turn someone onto pre-censorship movies at their most fun, sleazy and outrageous, just take them to Baby Face. But in 2005, Baby Face got even better. An archivist at the Library of Congress discovered a print of the original version of the fi lm, before it was trimmed and slightly re-shot to get it past the New York state censor board in 1933. Baby Face tells the story of a woman from a sorry background -- her father was her pimp -- who goes to the big city, intent on becoming rich by enslaving men sexually. The differences between the original and the release versions of Baby Face are small, and yet combined they spell the difference between a good three-star movie and a delightful fourstar movie. In the original, Lily goes to the city, not just with the vague intention of sleeping her way to the top (as was the case in the released version), but with the decided intention to act according to Nietzschean principles. Everything she does becomes part of a philosophical proposition. We know where she’s coming from and how she’s thinking, in a way that we didn’t before. In this version, we discover, for example, that Lily’s father has been pimping her out since she was 14. We also see how she makes it to New York. In a grim seduction scene that, unlike some that follow, isn’t at all played for laughs, she must have sex with a railroad worker in an empty freighter, to get a ride for herself and a friend. If you’ve never seen Stanwyck in a pre-Code fi lm, you’ve never really seen Stanwyck. What an indelible, one-of-akind talent. – Submitted by Angelina R.

Between 2008 and 2018 fi lmmaker Luke Holland conducted approximately 300 interviews with elderly men and women in Germany and Austria. His goal was to capture the thoughts and refl ections of those who either bore witness to or actively participated in the events which constituted Germany’s Final Solution. The result is an astounding fi lm that reminds us, rightly, that each and every German’s experience of the events leading up to and during World War II was, for all their similarities and common threads, ultimately unique. Holland deftly weaves these interviews together to expose the guilt, shame, and regret experienced by some, and the inability on behalf of others, even from a distance of more than seventy years, to come to terms realistically with the horrors of the genocide perpetrated by the Third Reich against Europe’s Jewish population. Throughout the fi lm, the seemingly relative ease by which individuals and groups became indoctrinated looms large, as does the methodical and meticulous nature by which that indoctrination was undertaken. In the tradition of Claude Lanzmann’s groundbreaking Shoah (1985), Final Account is equal parts disturbing and important, providing a fi rm reminder of each generation’s duty to understand humanity’s terrifying capacity for destruction, which is often closer at hand than we would care to believe. – Submitted by Patrick J. Reviews submitted by Ryan Gage. These great titles and others are available at the Kalamazoo Public Library.