Night Nurse (1931)

Pre-code Hollywood films, those made between the creation of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930 and April, 1934, when studios were finally forced to enforce it, can get pretty wild and wooly, but few of them are as nuts as Night Nurse, from Warners. Director William A. Wellman didn't get the nickname "Wild Bill" from his involvement with this movie, but he could have.

The picture stars Barbara Stanwyck as Lora Hart, who is turned down for a job as a nurse in training at a metropolitan hospital by Miss Dillon, the Superintendent of Nurses (Vera Lewis). It seems that Lora had to drop out of high school in her junior year when her mother died and you had to have a high school diploma to become a nurse. Leaving the hospital she runs into Dr. Bell (Charles Winninger), the boss doctor. He is impressed by her enthusiasm, and we may assume her looks, so she gets the job and becomes the roommate of another nurse in training, B. Maloney (Joan Blondell).

Let me stop right here to spend a minute or two (or more) as a Dirty Old Man. Stanwyck and Blondell are absolute knock-outs in this movie and Wellman piles on the prurience by taking every available opportunity to have the two of them strip out of their dresses. (I counted three times each, and I hadn't reached the point of blindness yet.) These hints of better things to come are not the only reminders that this is a pre-code film. It also contains drunkenness, child abuse and endangerment, attempted murder, attempted rape, bootlegging, medical malpractice, wild parties, murder, slapping dames around, and a generally cynical acceptance that this is the way life is.

After graduation, Hart and Maloney both go to work caring for a pair of pre-school-aged sisters who had been patients at the hospital. The girls grow weaker by the day and their doctor (Ralf Harolde) claims not to know what's wrong with them. Lora begins to suspect that the kids are being murdered by lack of nutrition, a theory that becomes a certainty when she finds out that the kids have a trust fund and that their alcoholic mother (Charlotte Merriam) is under the thumb of Nick the Chauffeur (Clark Gable), who wants that money.

Good Dr. Bell advises Lora to play along until she has enough evidence to blow the whistle on Nick and the crooked doctor. Nick figures out what she's up to and Lora has to be rescued by Mortie (Ben Lyon), a bootlegger out of whom she once extracted a bullet without telling the cops.

While maintaining a respect for the good deeds and intentions of dedicated doctors and nurses, the movie doesn't hesitate to point out that all is not well within the medical profession. "Say," Blondell wisecracks at one point, "I was afraid the hospital would burn down before I could get into it. Now I have to watch myself with matches."

The script is by Oliver H.P. Garrett and Charles Kenyon, adapted from a novel by Grace Perkins writing as Dora Macy. It's sassy and borderline anarchic, and as such a portrait of Wild Bill Wellman and it represents nicely the kind of picture Warner Bros. turned out regularly during this period. It's street smart and cynical, with a respect for ethics and decency it pretends it wants to hide. It's also hugely entertaining and a chance to see Gable as an absolute rat. (James Cagney was supposed to play Nick but he'd become a star in Wellman's The Public Enemy and Warners didn't want to waste him in a supporting role. Gable had a couple more years to wait.)

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