Night Nurse (1931)

Pulpy, violent and sexy (not necessarily in that order), Night Nurse presents a world seedy enough to make most noirs look like Disneyland by comparison. This Pre-Code gem is short, fast and slam-bang entertainment.

Barbara Stanwyck stars as Lora Hart, a dedicated young nurse who lands work in a city hospital. There’s not much else we need to know about Lora. She’s pretty, she’s strong-willed and she often needs to change into and out of clothes. For that latter task, she is often helped along by her nursing-school roommate, the wisecracking Miss Maloney (a scene-stealing Joan Blundell).

Eventually, the gals are assigned as in-home nurses for two severely ill little girls (Betty Jane Graham and Marcia Mae Jones) who appear to be slowly dying of malnourishment. Lora is rightly shocked. The girls’ mother, Mrs. Ritchie (Charlotte Merriam), is a drunken floozy we first see passed out on a bearskin rug. When conscious, the woman is entwined in an unsavory relationship with her chauffeur, a vicious lug named Nick (Clark Gable). As for the sick girls, they are receiving shamelessly incompetent medical treatment from a twitchy doctor (Ralf Harolde) whose career counseling to Lora includes such nuggets of wisdom as “the successful nurse is the one who keeps her mouth shut.”

Night Nurse is gloriously lurid. In addition to those scenes of Stanwyck and Blondell disrobing, Wellman tosses in Lora getting coldcocked by Nick, an attempted sexual assault and an avenging angel in the form of a likeable bootlegger (Ben Lyon) who takes a shine to our night nurse. The camerawork is surprisingly fluid for its time. From the film’s opening shot, the point of view of a city ambulance barreling toward the hospital, director William Wellman boasts a dynamic visual style rare among early talkies.

The cast appears to be having a grand time. Lyon isn’t a particularly convincing gangster, but Stanwyck and Blondell have great comic chemistry. Gable, who signed on to play Nick after James Cagney dropped out, makes a properly menacing heavy.

The change in casting proved fortuitous for the studio, Warner Brothers. Stanwyck credited Gable with the flick’s box-office success. “It was Gable who brought the crowds to see Night Nurse,” she said many years later. “The public couldn’t get enough of him.”