John Wayne Movie:

		List Price: $39.98		Label: Warner Home Video Salesrank: 8693 Released: December 5, 2006
		Our Price: $26.79
		Used Price: $19.92
		MPAA Rating: Unrated Media: DVD

Editorial Review:
Includes: Waterloo Bridge (1931), Baby Face (1933), and Red-Headed Woman (1932).

Description of TCM Archives - Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1 (Waterloo Bridge [1931] / Baby Face / Red-Headed Woman):
Here are three films that couldn't and wouldn't have been made at any other time. Contrary to popular belief, the history of Hollywood permissiveness, what filmmakers could "get away with" on screen, is not a steadily rising graph from puritanical early days to the party-hearty present. In the early 1930s, a national mood of shock over the stock market crash and impatience with Prohibition licensed a relaxation of the movie industry's self-censorship policies. Sexuality--always a driving force in movie plots and characterizations, even when repressed--became a more explicit presence, with costuming that sometimes pushed the envelope for exposure of epidermis and dialogue that could be shockingly blunt.

Baby Face (1933) was made at Warner Bros., the golden-age studio with the grittiest style and the most street cred. The gutsy Barbara Stanwyck stars as a young woman from a factory town who hops a boxcar to the big city and sleeps her way to the top--a progress famously indexed by a camera ascending floor by floor outside a Gotham office building as she trades up, one corporate suitor after another. No other major-studio film was more explicit about sex as a tool and a commodity, yetBaby Face is curiously less sexy than any number of movies that weren't so outspoken about it. This TCM collection features both the theatrical-release version familiar for decades and a recently rediscovered preview version that is markedly superior, runs five minutes longer, and includes more sexual liaisons. It also happily lacks an absurd final scene that got tacked onto the release version to explain how the heroine learned to be content with a modest lifestyle.

Red-Headed Woman (1932) is arguably the raunchiest movie Jean Harlow made at MGM (though not as raunchy as her scenes in Howard Hughes' 1930 Hell's Angels). Unlike Stanwyck in Baby Face--a proletarian heroine grimly selling herself to beat capitalism and the patriarchy at their own game--Harlow's character brazenly relishes both the sex and the posh life it wins for her. The lion's share of this sardonic comedy, scripted by Anita Loos and an uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald, focuses on Harlow's seduction of her married boss (Chester Morris) and the havoc she wreaks in his upper-crust world. Charles Boyer has a role (his first Hollywood credit) as a French chauffeur who knows how to give satisfaction, and the film's air of breezy ribaldry even allows the star a casual flash of bare breast.

The rarest item in the collection, the 1931 Universal version of Waterloo Bridge, has long been unseen because MGM bought the film in order to do a 1940 remake (starring Vivien Leigh) and locked the original away in the vault. Directed by James Whale the same year he did Frankenstein (1931), the picture charts the romance of a chorus-girl-turned-streetwalker (Mae Clarke) and a well-born young soldier (Kent Douglass) on brief furlough from the trenches during WWI. Apart from a zesty prelude in a London music hall and two scenes on the titular bridge, the film remains yoked to its talky theatrical source, a Robert E. Sherwood play flogging the hoary conceit that no fallen woman, however pure of heart, could be permitted to marry into a good family. Unlike the Hays Code-compliant remake, the film leaves no doubt how the heroine makes her living. --Richard T. Jameson

TCM Archives - Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1 (Waterloo Bridge [1931] / Baby Face / Red-Headed Woman) Reviews:
Should have remained forbidden
2009-09-12 - Not very interesting films selected simply because they fell under the approved subjects for their time.

What's Most Shocking Is What Isn't Shown
2009-08-30 - These Pre-Code films are being touted for the frankness of the subject matter. What I found interesting is despite the supposedly sordid material on display it seems that the makers were censoring themselves and only alluding to the most base behavior demonstrated by the films' "heroines". For the most prurient among us there is no nudity or wanton displays of carnal knowledge. As far as I'm concerned that's alright because in this age of anything goes some of our auteur's could use a little self-policing. The best of the bunch is "Baby Face" where Barbara Stanwyck plays a down-and-outer who has been mistreated by men her whole life. Directed to Nietzchean philosophy by a professorial type she learns how to exploit her feminine wiles in the corporate world and leaving casualties in her wake. There's a certain morality in the end that some may take offense to but I found it to be satisfying. "Waterloo Bridge" is a rather conventional love story between an American girl and a Canadian G.I. What distinguishes the film is that the girl is a streetwalker and the makers make no bones about her profession. A gritty film that could have been better if the principals, Mae Clarke and Kent Douglas, were better actors. Check out the remake with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor even if it is a somewhat sanitized version. The weakest film in the set I found to be is "Red Headed Woman". Once again we find a girl from the wrong side of the tracks(Jean Harlow) attempting to sleep her way to the top despite the ancilliary damage she may cause. The film suffers from a certain degree of staginess and incidental campiness. Harlow, a gifted comedienne taken before her time, elevates the otherwise inert material. I recommend this collection because I think it fascinating how social mores have changed in some ways and other ways not since these films were released in the Thirties.

Three Terrific Films and Great Discoveries!
2009-08-27 - I loved all three of the Forbidden Hollywood films. I had heard of a couple vaguely but had never really paid much attention to finding them. I enjoyed them all. Red Headed Woman has Harlow as hussy of the worst persuasion yet she triumphs over everyone. Waterloo Bridge is a very nice story. It is not romantic as the Vivien Leigh/ Robert Taylor version but very good with a shocking ending. No it isn't Anna Karenina style. My favorite which is available in two version here is Baby Face. Barbara Stanwyck shows that she was a top notch actress from the start. One of the great screen actresses of all time. She is another gold digger like Jean Harlow but reads Nietzsche for pleasure reading and enlightenment. Her life is more well developed as is her character. Her black friend becomes her maid. The two versions are definitely a requirement to view preferably one after another. You have to watch them all the way through too! You will love it! A great box set and very enjoyable to watch.

A treasure
2009-06-27 - Three wonderful pre-codes, well restored. Especially nice is the rarely seen Waterloo Bridge from 1931, which was over-shadowed by the more clean-cut remake with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor from 1940.
The only reason this product wasn't given five, but four, stars is the lack of extra material - there is only a short introduction by TCM God Robert Osbourne. But it gets better with volume two and three!

Three bad movies
2009-04-13 - These three movies have been beaufifully restored, but it doesn't change the fact that artistically they are bad. The acting is stiff, stagy. The writing is the same or worse.

Waterloo Bridge, perhaps the best of the lot, feels like a stage play, which was what it was in a previous life. Mae Clarke is attractive as the lead, but the soldier who falls in love with her is wretched. We are asked to believe that he fell in love with a prostitute minutes after meeting her and proposed marriage, whereupon he introduced her to his upper class family. Bah!

The other two movies, Red Headed Woman and Baby Face have even sillier plots and acting that is just as bad--or worse. The advertising of these movies would lead one to believe that they are racy, but the raciest scene in any of the three are the legs on the front of the case. The Hayes Office code didn't curtail the creativity of moviemakers, if these films are examples of Hollywood in its sinful era.