William Wellman (1931)
Night Nurse was screened as part of BFI’s ‘Hollywood Babylon: Early Talkies Before the Censor’ season, in a double bill with another Barbara Stanwyck film, Baby Face. Stanwyck, as the title character, Lora Hart, and her fellow nurse Maloney, played by Joan Blondell, appear in their underwear a few times but the violence is a good deal more startling than the exposed flesh in evidence. At one point, the villain of the piece, a chauffeur called Nick (Clark Gable), lands an uppercut which knocks Lora out – one of the pieces in the BFI programme note suggests that, while she’s out cold, he rapes her. William Wellman’s direction is pacy but Night Nurse is an uneasy mixture of the broadly comic and the seriously nasty
A senior but sinister hospital doctor (Ralf Harolde, with an incriminating twitchy eye) is working, in cahoots with the chauffeur, to kill – through a prescribed diet of malnourishment – the two daughters of Nick’s employer, the alcoholic socialite Mrs Ritchey (Charlotte Merriam). The doctor wants to get his hands on the money held in trust for the two girls (Betty Jane Graham and Marcia Mae Jones). Mrs Ritchey, in her more sober moments, is crazy for her handsome chauffeur. Clark Gable often gave the impression that he could treat a woman rough but the punch to Barbara Stanwyck’s chin (he also knocks a couple of men out in the course of the movie) still comes as a shock. Gable cuts a dashing figure in his chauffeur uniform and has a nice ambiguous menace as he stands grinning in the shadows but he’s not so good when he opens his mouth. There usually seems to be a party going on in Mrs Ritchey’s mansion where her children are being starved to death: the relentless hedonism and the giggling guests – when Lora, in her nurse’s uniform, interrupts the dancing, they ask if this is a costume party – become oppressively repellent. Thank goodness for Joan Blondell – who’s excellent, in what became her trademark role of the leading lady’s good-hearted, wisecracking best friend – and, especially, for Barbara Stanwyck, who fuses the comic and serious elements of the script (by Oliver H P Garrett, from a novel by Grace Perkins) with complete success. Radiating sanity and lacking any trace of sanctimony, Stanwyck is a heroine who does the right thing with a combination of tenacity and wit, and is never a goody-goody.
The cast also includes Ben Lyon, genially innocuous as Mortie, a bootlegger who takes a shine to Lora (she gradually reciprocates). It’s ‘a couple of guys’ Mortie knows who are responsible for Nick’s eventual arrival at the hospital for admission to the morgue – this DIY bringing-to-justice is another somewhat subversive streak of Night Nurse. With Charles Winninger as a decent physician (he recovers remarkably quickly from being laid out by Gable), Vera Lewis as the nursing superintendent and Walter McGrail, who has a good cameo as a drunken guest at the Ritchey residence.
3 May 2014
