Let’s say this first – if you like Pre-Code movies, you will
love Night Nurse. It’s a full blast of the fun that Pre-Code films can hold:
wisecracking best friends, snappy dialogue, unconventional plot twists and, of
course, Barbara Stanwyck in her early red-headed days.
But it’s an unusual role for Stanwyck, because the character
of Laura Hart is something we don’t expect from the usually hard-boiled
Stanwyck: a starry-eyed idealist. She’s not naïve – it’s established from the
start that she’s a working-class girl who was forced to drop out of high school
and work to support herself – but she loves nursing and wants to be the best
nurse she can be. Even at the end of the film when she’s forced to leave the field
she loves, her disillusionment hasn’t made her hard or cynical. She remains the
same warm, caring, confident person we saw when the film opened.
It’s sometimes startling to see the contrast between the
Pre-Code Stanwyck and her Production Code persona. There is a definite difference
between the two. In her Production Code films, there’s something a little cold
about Stanwyck even in her romances – something a little remote and mysterious.
In her Pre-Code films, Stanwyck holds nothing back. She lays it all on the
table and dares the audience to judge her for it. And director William “Wild Bill” Wellman
backs her up with a tough, punchy film that showcases Stanwyck’s strengths as
an actress.
Night Nurse opens with a shot through the windshield of a
speeding ambulance skidding through the city and coming to a stop at the door
of the Emergency Ward. Laura Hart (Barbara Stanwyck) comes to the hospital to beg for a spot in
the nursing apprentice program run by Miss Dillon (Vera Lewis) but despite
Laura’s work experience, Miss Dillon stands firmly by her rule that all
trainees must have a high school diploma … until a chance encounter with head
of the hospital Dr. Bell (Charles Winniger) wins Laura the spot.
Laura immediately bonds with fellow nursing apprentice
Maloney (a gum-popping Joan Blondell), who introduces Laura to the ins and outs
of the hospital. We get the requisite lingerie shot as Laura tries on nursing
uniforms with intern Eagan (Edward J. Nugent) spying nearby. When Laura tells
him to get lost, Eagan replies, “You can’t show me anything – I just came from
the delivery room.”
True to her word, Laura is a natural when to comes to
nursing – when assigned to the Maternity Ward, she is in her element as the
queen of her little realm of breastfeeding mothers and newborns:
When Laura and Maloney are caught sneaking in after hours,
they are punished with several weeks on the night shift in the Emergency Ward,
where Laura meets a charming bootlegger (Ben Lyon) with a gunshot wound to the shoulder.
After some deliberation, she agrees not to report the wound even though the law
requires it, and he calls her his “pal.” It becomes a running joke as the
bootlegger sends gifts from “Your Pal,” including a bottle of (illegal) rye
before Laura’s last test as a nursing apprentice: a stint in the operating room
that causes her to faint after the patient is lost on the operating table, but
with Maloney’s help she’s able to keep sufficiently in control to do it after the operation is over and is
allowed to graduate.
Remember what I said about Stanwyck playing an idealist?
Watch the scene of her graduation as she takes the Florence Nightingale Pledge. Maloney
can barely stop cracking her gum long enough to get through the words, but
Laura believes each and every one with all of her heart:
Laura’s resolve is tested by her very first private case,
though. She is sent to be the night shift nurse for two little girls being
treated for malnutrition. Maloney is the day nurse and warns Laura that there’s
something “screwy” about the case: the well-respected Dr. Bell has been removed and
replaced by society doctor Ranger (Ralf Harolde) – sharp-eyed viewers may
recognize him from another role as an unscrupulous doctor in 1941’s Murder, MySweet.
Laura almost quits the job after her first night where she
encounters the man who’s really in charge of the household – Nick, the
chauffeur:
Why, yes, that’s Clark Gable in his early gangster days –
you can tell he’s playing a villain because he has no mustache. He’s
fourth-billed here, so I’ll talk about him more when we get to another film
where he has a meatier gangster role, 1931’s A Free Soul (running on TCM Friday
9/26 at 6:00 a.m. ET).
An incensed Laura first takes her complaint to Dr. Ranger,
but she quickly realizes that he’s a quack, and possibly a drug addict –
Harolde plays Ranger as sharp and twitchy, with a suspicious sniffle. She then
turns to Dr. Bell, who urges her to remain on the case to try and protect her
little patients. If she really thinks the little girls are being deliberately
starved to death, she needs to stay on the case to get the proof she needs to
swear out a warrant. She goes back to Ranger and apologizes so humbly that he
generously agrees to let her stay on the case. But Laura’s doubts about the
medical ethics she was taught are growing, because it seems as though those
ethics are preventing her from saving her patients from the murderous Nick.
The girls get sicker and sicker until Nanny (Marcia Mae
Jones) is on the verge of death. Laura confronts their neglectful mother, Mrs.
Ritchey (Charlotte Merriam), but she’s too drunk to respond:
(By the way, many people now mishear Mrs. Ritchey’s line: she
says she’s a “dipsomaniac,” which was the original term for what we now call an
alcoholic. Because it’s archaic, some people mishear it as the more common
“nymphomaniac.”)
Heading back to the sickroom, Laura runs into her bootlegger
bringing more supplies to the party, but he drops everything to help her and
proves himself a valuable ally: he gets the milk Laura needs to give Nanny a
milk bath, has his men track down Dr. Bell, forces Nick to retreat, and spends
the night outside the children’s room to prevent Nick from coming back. Bell
saves Nanny with a blood transfusion provided by Laura, who finally has the
evidence she needs to swear out a warrant against Dr. Ranger and Mrs. Ritchey. Maloney warns Laura that this means the end of her career as a nurse, but Laura
accepts that – her priority is to save the girls and she’s willing to give up
the career she loves to do it.
The bootlegger agrees to drive Laura downtown to swear out
the warrant, and it turns out that her “pal” has been even more helpful than he
said:
Ah, Pre-Code, where premeditated murder and a happy ending
can go hand-in-hand.
Fans of Production Code films often scoff at the lurid
trappings of many Pre-Code films, saying that they were all about sex and
scandal without any serious underpinnings. Obviously, Night Nurse has its racy
elements, including several lingerie scenes and Laura’s near-rape by Mrs.
Ritchie’s drunken boyfriend, but the film is all about ethics. It asks why a
society doctor who conspires in the attempted murder of two children should be
more respected than the working-class nurse who uncovers his plot. It asks why
“professional ethics” should be invoked to ignore the murder plot. And it
presents a criminal – the bootlegger – who is more ethical and courageous than
any of the “respectable” characters. At one point, Laura hisses, “I’ll kill the
next one who says ‘ethics’ to me!” and by that time, we’re firmly on her side.
If conventional morality and ethics mean that two little girls can be murdered
with impunity while all of the “ethical” people stand by wringing their hands,
well, bring on the bootlegger. At least he gets things done.
You said it! Big Time, Sister!
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