Movie of the Week: Night Nurse (1931)

As I said yesterday, for the next year I will be featuring a movie a week (some lumped together for time’s sake). I’ll be doing a write-up of each film (yes, I am re-watching all these) and posting photos and trivia.

These posts will not be in chronological order, so for no particular reason other than the fact that I recently re-watched it, I bring you Night Nurse!

Night Nurse is a rather racy pre-code film. You’ve got every pre-code box checked: Half naked girls, men throwing women around, sexual innuendo, heck you even got children being neglected and murdered.

What starts out as the story of poor, orphaned and uneducated Lora Hart (Barbara Stanwyck) earning her nurse’s credentials and working her way through the various departments of the hospital quickly meanders into a story of an evil chauffeur and drug-addicted doctor scheming to keep a mother a drunk so they can murder her children and walk away with the family’s money.  Yikes.

The hospital scenes are interesting to me. When Laura applies to be a nurse, she is told she does not qualify because she only finished three years of high school and nurses must have a high school diploma. Is that all? We are introduced quickly to the maternity ward, where a man asks if the baby a nurse is holding is a boy. “No, a girl,” says the nurse. The man scoffs. “I hope my baby’s not a girl!” His wife (seemingly in labor yet laying perfectly still and quaint on a gurney) “I’ll do my best!” she tells her husband as she is wheeled away. Lordy. The new mothers are all kept in one large room and their babies are delivered to them, loosely wrapped in blankets half covering their faces, on a long cart. I was thinking to myself there had to be a lot of switched-at-birth scenarios back in the day–there was seemingly no order to this procession.

After working hard at the hospital, Lora is assigned to be a night nurse to two little girls suffering from malnutrition and anemia. Clark does not appear until halfway through the film and only appears for a few minutes, as Nick, the evil brute of a chauffeur. Lora becomes suspicious of the doctor treating the children and of Nick. Nick throws her around, bullies her and the children say they are scared of him. Lora soon comes to the realization that Nick and the doctor are in it together–to starve the children to death and keep their mother a drunk so they can get their hands on the family’s fortune. It really is a rather disturbing story. Two little girls who are starving and whine that they are hungry, they want to play but don’t have the strength and they are sad that their mother never comes to see them (even though she’s in the same house and has roaring parties every night, just down the hall!), and all the while are threatened by the house staff that is supposed to protect them.  Oh, and they mention they had another sister but that she was “run over and over again” by the chauffeur. Lordy.

This film is all Stanwyck’s–and it should be. Stanwyck’s little pre-code dramas are some of my very favorites. Their luster lies in their grittiness and reality–something that would be completely lost just a few years later when the powers-that-be put the stop to such alarming storylines as starving innocent children for money. She is in her element, in her bobbed 20’s hair, thick lipstick and calf-length skirt, standing up to the man and telling him what’s what.

You’ve also got a fun supporting cast, with Joan Blondell as her wisecrackin’ roommate–““Take my tip and keep away from interns; they’re like cancer–the disease is known but not the cure! There’s only one guy in the world that can do a nurse any good and that’s a patient with dough. Just catch one of them with a high fever and a low pulse and make him think you saved his life and you’ll be getting somewhere. And doctors are no good, either. They never marry nurses. And the trouble with interns is they do! All a wife means to an intern is someone to sit in his front office when he starts practice and play nursemaid the rest of her life without pay! The thing to do is to land an appendicitis case–they’ve all got dough!” and Ben Lyon as her bootlegger love interest.

Clark is a footnote here; his lines consist of “Aw, shut up!,” “I’ll break your neck!,”  and “I’d run along if I was you.”

And (spoiler alert) he meets his end offscreen at the hands of Lora’s bootlegger buddies. See, that’s what you get for running over and starving little girls. Tsk tsk.

This film came out right after Clark’s star-making turn in A Free Soul and after that, he was a man-above-the-title. No more one-dimensional chauffeurs!

Full page devoted to Night Nurse located here. 

My nutshell review from 2014 is here.

My full review is here.

Look out for trivia and photos this week on our Facebook page and Instagram.