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 This is a Pre-Code film with Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell and Clark Gable
with Stanwyck and Blondell as a couple of nurses and Gable as a chauffeur to a
wealthy woman. Stanwyck plays Lora Hart and she takes a job as a nurse for
this rich woman's kids, discovering that the chauffeur and the family doctor
are starving the kids and keeping the rich woman drunk so that they can collect
a trust fund. Lora tries to save the kids and gets help from her nice-guy
bootlegger boyfriend. They say that this one is "full of racy dialogue,
decadent settings and daring performances, making it even more entertaining and
fun to watch today." 1931, 73 minutes, VHS
This movie showed me that when people talk about the "good old days" with their
"wholesome, family-friendly" movies and whine about how the liberals have
ruined Hollywood and why can't anyone put a decent picture without all the sex
and violence and Steve Buscemi, that as I always suspected, they were talking
out of the wrong side of their cakehole. Night Nurse was made way back in 1931 which was so long ago that it had only been
something like 20 or 25 years since the Cubs won their last World Series and
featured two stars that would go on to be giants of that era - Barbara Stanwyck
and Clark Gable. This was at a time before the Production Code went into
effect and cleaned up the filthy perverts that pervaded Hollywood with their
dirty little movies about nurses, evil chauffeurs and bootleggers with hearts
of gold. Since big brother was nowhere to be found, Stanwyck was free to do
what nurses do best - change in and out of clothes with welcome frequency.
Those of you familiar with some of the movies of the seventies (not too long
after the hippies, commies, and sex fiends regained their malignant strangle
hold on Hollywood) will note that the best movies of that era involved nurses
of some sort (usually candystripers), so it is probably incumbent on you to see
this movie, if for no other reason than to take a gander a what a bra from 1931
looked like. I wouldn't try and claim that this is a great movie by any means,
but I will say that it's bizarrely entertaining in its own pre-code way. Any
movie where Clark Gable is trying to slowly starve two precious little kids to
death, instead of dumping Scarlett on her head is okay with me. I should also
note that this nurse film laid out all the material for the nurse films of the
future in that Stanwyck's nurse Lora Hart has a nurse gal pal by the name of
Maloney. She's played by Joan Blondell and is one of those platinum blondes
from the 1930s so you know she's good and brassy. Director William Wellman,
showing a shrewd sense of what the audience wants, uses Maloney to do important
things like help Stanwyck get undressed. You might be tempted to ask why
Stanwyck couldn't take her own stocking off, but really, why would you?  Lora comes to the hospital to pursue her dream of becoming a nurse. Since she
doesn't have a high school diploma, the ugly hag in charge of things tells her
to get lost. I found this to be kind of silly since we all know that they
didn't even have schools back in 1931. Heck, back then President Lincoln was
still writing his speeches in coal on a shovel or something while hanging out
in the White House privy. Lora is disappointed that it turned out her loser
guidance counselor was right and that you really did need an education to
become a sexy nurse, not just some silky undergarments and a brassy blonde
friend. Luckily for her she bumps into a nice old man and drops her purse and
its contents. He's a gentleman so he picks up her stuff for her and leers at
her periodically and it turns out that this isn't any sexually frustrated dirty
old nursing home escapee, but is really the chief of surgery at the hospital!
Next thing you know, he's marching back to the old hag and telling her that
Lora is going to be a nurse there (she'll be assisting me during all those
operations in my pants). Lora, who had walked in with a second grade education
and a reference from her friendly neighborhood grocer is now allowed to enroll
in their nursing program. The hag tells her that there are strict rules about
how late she can be out, how much time she gets off, and that there will be
severe penalties if she breaks any of the rules. At this point, I was busy
trying to contact my congressperson because it was plain to me that these
Hollywood types had gone way too far and we needed some kind of rating system
for old movies from before the code so that innocent kids aren't tempted,
tricked, or dared into watching some filthy movie from 1931 in all its
Eurotrash black and white fetish glory. Luckily, before I Fed Exed my
complaint, I came to figure out that these severe penalties we were promised
amounted to nothing more than some extra night shifts. You know, if I was
nurse (don't ask), and they assigned me extra night shifts, I'd probably turn
into one of those "angels of death" or something. By the by, if you're hoping
that these night shifts involve a whirlpool bath with a doctor or something,
you would be sorely disappointed, but I would direct you to such after-hours
doctor fare like Halloween II or maybe Shatner's Visiting Hours (though it's been years since I've seen that, so I couldn't tell you what went
on there).  On her way to becoming a full-fledged night nurse, Lora has all sorts of crazy
adventures. She has to watch a surgery without fainting (she finally manages
to do this on her third try even though the patient dies - we're told that the
doctor has a one in one-hundred chance of success and I was reminded of the
line from Dumb and Dumber: "so there is a chance!"), she gets some pranks played on her by some horny interns (they
place skeletons in her bed - for some reason this necessitates her and her
brassily blonde friend to sleep together in a single bed in their underwear -
thank god WWII finally came along to get everyone's mind out of the gutter),
but most importantly for the plot's purposes she runs into a bootlegger named
Mortie. Mortie has been shot in the shoulder and needs to be fixed up. Lora
is duty-bound to report all gunshot wounds to the coppers, but something about
Mortie convinces her that he's an okay guy (and could probably get her some
cheap hooch) so she sews him up and doesn't tell on him. Finally she and her
blonde buddy graduate and become full-fledged nurses. The next thing I know,
both of these dames have left the hospital and gotten themselves hired out as
private nurses. Lora is a night nurse while Maloney is a day nurse. They both
work the same job, caring for a pair of whiney brats that can't act who are very
ill. They suffer from malnourishment and were at the hospital, but once they
came home, Lora's doctor buddy was taken off the case and a new, more sinister
doctor named Milton Ranger was assigned to the case. Now, even though Miltie
doesn't belong to the medical association and can't get any hospital to hire
him, Lora's doctor friend (Dr. Bell) doesn't want to second guess his nefarious
colleague (something about how lots of dirty stuff in the medical profession is
kept behind closed doors so that patients don't lose confidence in their
Barbados-educated docs). Lora is suspicious (because she's the star of the
movie, not the blonde) of things that are going on in the house and gets little
help from Maloney or the old hag housekeeper that has an obsession with giving
kids milk bathes. 
Lora gets started on everything by getting some inside dirt from
under-nourished kids (shouldn't you be feeding these twerps instead of
interrogating them?). First off, they had a sister, but she got "runned over"
and the kids described how she was all cut up everywhere and Lora demonstrates
all she learned in nursing school by instructing the kids to never speak of
their dead sister again. Then they start talking about some guy named Nick.
Nick is not their daddy (he's in heaven with their sister), but the chauffeur
who runs things around the house and he's a real meanie. They have a mommy,
too, but she's a lush, which soon becomes apparent. There's a scream and Lora
rushes into a room to find mommy passed out. The guy she was with soon tries
to rape Lora, but Nick comes (about forty minutes into the picture - what's the
hold up, Clark?) and punches the guy out. Lora tries to call the cops, but he
punches her out as well! She goes to Dr. Ranger and says she's tattling on
Nick and he tells her she better not, so she goes and tattles to Dr. Bell and
he tells her to go back to the house, undercover as a night nurse and get the
goods on whatever is going on there. Hopefully she'll complete her little
Nancy Drew routine before the kids waste away. During all this she also finds
time to run into her bootlegging pal Mortie at the drug store having a soda.
He claims that he's all reformed and that he now only bootlegs Cherry Cokes
from the soda fountain. Then he leaves and doesn't show up until our little
night nurse needs to be bailed out of trouble again. Soon the kids are getting
sicker and even a milk bath doesn't help. Lora has a confrontation with the
drunken mother (she's having a party while her kids starve upstairs). Mortie
the bootlegger shows up at the party, obviously not quite entirely reformed,
but still possessing a heart of gold when it comes to a certain night nurse
who's prone to changing in and out her clothes (Milk bath, anyone?). The
housekeeper gets into Mortie's cheap booze, gets wasted and starts shooting her
mouth off about a trust fund the kids have and the mother is in charge off. Yep, in case you haven't guessed (or read the back of the video box), it's the
old "starve the kids with the trust fund until they die and keep their mom so
drunk she doesn't care"
gag. The bootlegger shows up with a gun in his pocket (I hope that's what that
was!) and gets Nick to leave. Lora is determined to make a complaint to the
cops finally and she leaves with Mortie and drives off in his car happily ever
after. Mortie tells her that he's had Nick taken care of, and then we see an
ambulance pull up to the hospital and it has a body for the morgue. Strangest
thing about it though, he was dressed in a chauffeur's uniform. While the
movie isn't one of Stanwyck's best and her character isn't terribly interesting
(she shouts a lot about ethics and doesn't do a whole lot to get those kid out
of danger until it's more convenient for her career), the creepy plot with
Clark Gable starving kids and making their mom and alcoholic with the help of
his crooked doctor friend,
along with the anything-goes attitude the lack of a production code allows this
one, makes it much more enjoyable than a lot of similarly aged movies that have
dated from not only from a story standpoint, but also from a technical
standpoint.
Technically, the movie didn't have great sound and scenes had a way off ending
a bit awkwardly (there was also no background music except when there was a
party
going on), but it wasn't overly talky or slow and once Clark Gable finally got
around to being in this movie, things started to get going. There's nothing
here that today's audiences will be shocked by, but after watching several
later films that had their endings compromised by the censors, it was nice to
see that things weren't so neatly wrapped up, with every character getting what
she or he deserved. Yes, Nick got killed, but it was offscreen and was ordered
by a bootlegger. The bootlegger who never reformed got the girl and apparently
continued on with his illicit career. Meanwhile, the most culpable of all
characters, the mother, was never dealt with in any way. Who knows what her
fate was, but you can bet that once the Production Code went into effect that
she would have had to pay some kind of price so that all us immoral morons out
there would know that good always beats evil, crime doesn't pay, and nurses
never get undressed with one another. This is obviously a sordid little
potboiler that is worth a look and only serves to make you wonder how great
some of the movies of the late thirties and forties would have been without the
spectre of the Production Code hanging over them.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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