NIGHT NURSE (1931)

A night in the life of a big city hospital: we ride in an ambulance as it arrives with a car crash victim. A big Chinese family is celebrating yet another baby. A dying man is being attended to. Finally we settle on Barbara Stanwyck, a tough cookie who is trying to apply for a position in a nurse training program. She is turned down for lack of a high school degree, but on her way out, she literally runs into a renowned surgeon (Charles Winninger). He apologizes, they chat, and he ends up getting her into the program. Her roommate is Joan Blondell, another tough cookie, and they hit it off well. Blondell warns her to stay away from romantic entanglements with interns and doctors and to try her luck with rich patients. One night, Stanwyck helps a bootlegger (Ben Lyon) with a bullet wound, and agrees not to call the police; he calls her his pal and says he'll never forget her. During her first surgery assisting, the patient dies and Stanwyck manages to hold it together until everyone is cleared out when she faints dead away. But she becomes a full-fledged nurse and is soon put on night duty at the home of a rich woman (Charlotte Merriam) whose two young children are ill and emaciated. Stanwyck suspects that the mother is guilty of neglect, but soon it becomes clear that the family chauffeur (Clark Gable, pictured with Stanwyck) is working with a corrupt doctor to slowly starve the kids to death in order to marry the mom and share in the money that would have been the kids' trust fund. With some help from Blondell, Winninger, and Lyon, Stanwyck saves the day.

This pre-Code film is rife with what would have been seen as adult material back then. Despite Prohibition, the drinking is constant at Merriam's home and people are frequently seen drunk. At one point, Merriam screams hysterically, "I'm a dipsomaniac and l like it!" Gable is said to keep Merriam "hopped up and full of booze." Despite her warning to Stanwyck, we discover that Blondell is sleeping with an intern (and not a likable one) who is also a drug addict. There are a couple of scenes of Stanwyck and Blondell in bras and slips. When Stanwyck is threatening to make trouble, she keeps being told that medical ethics won't allow anyone to help her out, and she rants to Blondell, "I'll kill the next one that says 'ethics' to me!" When Gable gets tired of her meddling ways, he socks her in the jaw (a fairly shocking scene even now). In the end, a sympathetic character murders someone and gets away with it. Directed by William Wellman (Beau Geste, Battleground), the movie has a fast pace and never stops moving, right from its opening ambulance ride to its closing ambulance ride. The stars are good, with Gable a standout in the kind of bad guy role he wouldn't be playing much longer. Along with Baby Face and The Divorcee, an archetypal example of the kind of movie that would come to an end with the establishment of the Production Code in 1934. [DVD]