"Warners' ineffably tough Baby Face is a crude but powerful morality play in which Barbara Stanwyck splits her father's Erie, Pennsylvania speakeasy, where she's a waitress-hooker, for the wider opportunities of New York. Landing a job by granting the personnel clerk a lunchtime quickie, she systematically sleeps her way up the corporate ladder (one rung being a youthful John Wayne). More businesslike than Lulu or even the Blue Angel, Stanwyck needs a mere seventy minutes to conquer the bank's huge phallic skyscraper, climbing from one floor to the next....When this force of nature finally marries the Chairman of the Board, the bank is shaken to its foundations; it nearly goes broke from the negative publicity. Code, shmode. This movie probably couldn't be made today even as a comedy."-J. Hoberman