Notes for March 5, 2025.

March 5, 2025. Day .

CD (Cinema Dave): Night Nurse (USA, 1931, dir. William Wellman)
Terrific 70-min pre-code movie. Young Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell are nurses Lora Hart and "Maloney", learning the ropes of the profession, and constantly changing their clothes and each other’s clothes on screen. They share a room (they seem to live in the hospital where they are initally employed) and sometimes a bed (after a nasty, naughty intern places a cadaver skeleton in one ot their twin beds, in what he describes as a "prank"). Clark Gable is the baddie, in an early appearance. He's "Nick the Chauffeur", and his all-black driver's getup is like a Nazi SS uniform, but without all the insignia. He doesn't yet have the Rhett Butler moustache.

The plot is, in a word, insane. Stanwyck & Blondell are sent to nurse to the children of a drunken high society lady. ("I'm a dipsomaniac! I'm a dipsomaniac and I'm proud of it!" the lady avers, loudly.) Her two adorable little girls are dying, you see, because they have been forbidden to have food, on the orders of a drug-addicted society doctor with a give-away eye twitch, Dr. Ranger.

Rather than just sneak the little tykes some food, Stanwyck tries to go to the police, or get a nice drug-free doctor to go to the police, but everybody says don't do that, no one will believe her; such is Dr. Ranger’s reputation. And the old housekeeper sees to it that the doctor's orders, and the orders of Nick the Chauffeur, are followed, despite the girls' woeful comments like "I wish we had something to eat." Meanwhile Stanwyck shows no compunction about breaking some different rules (possibly more sensible ones) by treating a bloody but presumably handsome bootlegger’s bullet wound.

I won't give the rest of the story away, but maybe that bootlegger turns out to be a swell fella after all, and the scary chauffeur turns out to be not quite on the up-and-up. It all ends very, very satisfyingly, except you don’t get to see the little girls eat any food.

movies pre-Code Hollywood Night Nurse Barbara Stanwyck Joan Blondell Clark Gable Cinema Dave