REGISTERED NURSE (1934)

Bebe Daniels is married to a boorish alcoholic (Gordon Westcott) who gets seriously hurt in a drunk driving accident, forcing her to go back to work as a nurse. She becomes a popular employee but hides her past, so two doctors thinking she’s at liberty pursue her: the playboyish Lyle Talbot (pictured with Daniels) and the more stable John Halliday. When an insane patient is operated on, Daniels freaks out; it turns out that her husband is in an asylum. With her secret out, Halliday agrees to operate on the husband to try and restore him to sanity, but a meddling patient (Sidney Toler), thinking he's doing Daniels a favor, plants the idea of suicide in Westcott's head, leading to disaster. This pre-Code melodrama moves along nicely, if predictably, and has some diverting characters, including Beulah Bondi as the older head nurse, Minna Gombell as a hard boiled nurse who's engaged to marry a policeman, Renee Whitney as a flirt, and a couple of wrestlers known as Sonovitch the Terrible Bulgarian and El Humid the Bone-Crushing Turk—real-life wrestler Tor Johnson, who found B-movie fame in the 50s as a member of Ed Wood's repertory company, plays the Bulgarian. A couple of amusing lines: Talbot is referred to at one point as having "muffed the op," and someone asks Bondi if she'd like a "bosom caresser"—that is, a drink that warms you "all the way down." [TCM]