Code red alert

Parents, lock up your children. Wives, keep a wary eye on your husbands. “Baby Face” is coming to town.

More specifically, the uncensored version of the profane Holy Grail of pre-Code Hollywood cinema is coming to Los Angeles more than 70 years after it unhinged censorship boards from East to West by standing behind its unapologetic tag line: “She had IT and made IT pay.”

Recently discovered by the Library of Congress, this original version of the Barbara Stanwyck-starring 1933 film will be the opening attraction tonight (along with the Edward G. Robinson vehicle “Two Seconds”) in the UCLA Film and Television Archives series “Sin Uncensored: Hollywood Before the Code.”

The sequel to a highly successful event UCLA put on two years ago, “Sin Uncensored” will focus on items that might be called racy and rare. The films to be shown, as yet unavailable on commercial video or DVD, typify the genre that is fast becoming the vice of choice for savvy film enthusiasts.

The term pre-Code refers to the brief window, from March 1930 to July 1934, after Hollywood embraced sound films but before it had to worry about censorship. The industry subsequently established the Motion Picture Production Code to fend off legislative censorship and hired former Republican National Committee Chairman Will Hays as its strict enforcer -- from script to finish. As Thomas Doherty wrote of these films in his definitive “Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema,” “More unbridled, salacious, subversive and just plain bizarre than what came afterward, they look like Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from a parallel universe.”

Pre-Code films in the UCLA series often make use of sexually exploitative situations. For instance, 1934’s “Mandalay” has Kay Francis poured into a silver evening gown as a “hostess” in a Rangoon nightclub. And 1930’s “East Is West” offers Mexican actress Lupe Velez, of all people, as the beautiful Chinese Ming Toy, put up for sale at a love-slave auction.

Then there is the provocatively titled “Bondage” (1933), a ripped-from-the-headlines kind of problem picture that vividly re-creates the dynamics of the women’s prison picture inside a home for unwed expectant mothers. Yet it progressively goes out of its way to blame society, not the heroine, for whatever trouble she’s in.

“Bondage” stars Dorothy Jordan as Judy Peters, introduced in court about to become a three-time loser for “being a dissolute person and offering on a public street.” Then a handsome doctor comes forward and relates her tale of woe, including a whirl with a crooner known as the Melancholy Minstrel and time spent in that expectant mothers home, run by the evil Miss Trigg, a matron so sadistic she’d make Ilsa She-Wolf of the S.S. look like Little Mary Sunshine. All in an action-packed 62 minutes.

Whatever happens in “Bondage,” it has nothing on the goings-on in “Baby Face,” which stars Stanwyck in a delightfully energetic performance as Lily Powers, the smartest, funniest, most ambitious character in the film. Starting life as “the sweetheart of the night shift” in her father’s speakeasy in Erie, Pa., she moves to New York, where she gets an entry-level job at the Gotham Trust Co. bank building and proceeds to sleep her way to the top, almost literally floor by floor.

All of this was way too salacious even for the easygoing standards of the time. When the censored version, the only one audiences ever saw, came out, Variety bluntly said, “Anything hotter than this for public showing would call for an asbestos audience blanket. ‘Baby Face’ and Lil are just too bad all the way.”

So things stood until Library of Congress curator Michael Mashon discovered that his archive had an unseen-in-decades copy of the pre-censored film. This includes a scene of Lily’s father selling her to a corrupt politician for a big wad of bills and her own furious cri de coeur: “Yeah I’m a tramp. Who’s to blame? My father. Nothing but men since I was 14.”

Also changed was the role of a philosophical cobbler, who chides Lily for her wicked ways in the censored version but in the uncensored film eggs her on, advising her, “Use men to get the things you want.” He even sends her a volume of Nietzsche along with the prescription to “crush out all sentiment.”

Though pre-Code films were known for their sexual frankness, they had other virtues, including energy and a lively sense of fun. By packing all kinds of action and attitude into features that rarely lasted much over 70 minutes, they also knew enough not to waste an audience’s time. And they proved to be a kind of training ground for future stars: John Wayne plays one of Baby Face’s boy toys, and Bette Davis is sixth-billed as the hero’s sister in 1931’s “Waterloo Bridge.”

Because pre-Code films did not live for titillation alone, they at times were simply dramatic films that used the era’s freedoms to tell different kinds of stories. That enabled them to provide terrific roles for actresses who relished the chance to play richer, more complex parts than they otherwise would have had.

“Waterloo Bridge” was an example of that, giving star Mae Clark, best known as the woman Jimmy Cagney smashed a grapefruit into, the strongest role of her career. She gives an emotional and effective performance as an American chorus girl in London during World War I who tries to hide her current life of prostitution from the naive U.S. soldier who falls deeply in love with her.

Also more effective than usual was Miriam Hopkins, who in “Two Kinds of Women” plays the jazz baby daughter of a U.S. senator from South Dakota who considers New York the epicenter of immorality. Naturally, the young woman goes to Manhattan and falls in love with a jaded playboy with a secret past. The film has a surprisingly contemporary feel as well as great lines like this one, from a gold digger: “I wouldn’t treat a dog the way I’m going to treat you. But then I never met a dog that had any money.”

One of the most interesting films and most unexpected performances in the UCLA series is Fay Wray’s in 1934’s “Mills of the Gods.” Though the film is built around a commanding turn by May Robson as the cranky matriarch of industrial giant Hastings Plow Works, Wray steals our hearts as Robson’s spoiled brat granddaughter who falls in love with fiery union organizer Victor Jory. Shamelessly melodramatic as well as socially conscious, “Mills of the Gods” (shown in a splendid new print provided by Sony) is the kind of delirious film that made pre-Code the era impossible to resist.