![]() That’s how Lily gets everything she thinks she wants out of life, but Stanwyck’s performance - grounded, vital, more hardscrabble than salacious - offers something beyond vicarious thrills. She heads to the big city, where she sleeps her way to the top tier of a sky-high financial institution. In Baby Face, Stanwyck’s Lily Powers, an oppressed young woman decidedly from the other side of the tracks, watches her abusive father die in a fire - and almost smiles. ![]() In 1933, Barbara Stanwyck defied the Hays Office, that huffy watchdog of our moviegoing morals, with a performance that might have been shocking if it weren’t so dazzling in its cold practicality. ![]() When Peter Guralnick released Last Train to Memphis, the first half of his superb two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, some people must have wondered, “Who needs two books to tell the story of Elvis?” They may as well have grumbled, “ Two whole books about America?” Some lives, some careers, push outward and up, expanding until they burst that flimsy constraint we call a frame of reference. ![]()
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