Night Nurse (Warner Bros., 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The final Barbara Stanwyck film my husband Charles and I watched last night was Night Nurse, a 1931 Warner Bros. proletarian melodrama in which Lora Hart (Stanwyck) wants a job as a nurse in a big-city hospital, at least partly because they offer her money to train as well as once she’s licensed. At first she’s turned down by the hospital’s formidable nursing director, Miss Dillon (Vera Lewis), because she dropped out of high school to take care of her sick mother, but then she bumps into the hospital’s director of surgery, Dr. Bell (Charles Winninger), as she’s leaving her first failed interview. Dr. Bell accidentally knocks Lora’s box of belongings out of her hand, they spill and he gallantly helps her pick them up. Then Miss Dillon pops out, says, “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Dr. Bell?,” and hires her on the spot. (So a far more innocent incarnation of the Stanwyck character has unwittingly used the same strategy to get ahead she did in Baby Face far more intentionally and ruthlessly.) The nurses’ training program at the hospital requires the would-be nurses to live in a dormitory inside the building (as was true 20 years later when my mother trained to be a nurse under similar circumstances), and Lora luckily gets similarly down-to-earth Maloney (Joan Blondell) as her roommate. Lora draws the decidedly unwelcome attentions of an intern (Allan Lane) who plays a prank on her by sneaking a skeleton into her bed, and she ends up with a bootlegger boyfriend, Mortie (Ben Lyon, second-billed), who becomes her best bud when she treats him after he’s been wounded in the arm in a shoot-out and she breaks the law by not reporting the bullet wound to the police. Lora gets assigned to the night shift as a punishment, but eventually both she and Maloney get their credentials.

Lora’s first assignment outside the hospital is as a private-duty nurse to take care of two young girls, Desney (Betty Jane Graham) and Nanny (Marcia Mae Jones) Ritchey. The Ritchey girls were doing well in the hospital but their condition has nose-dived since they were discharged and sent home. Their mother (Charlotte Merriam) has become a drunk, dissipated woman who throws wild parties in her home, complete with a live jazz band playing W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (a piece also used as a symbol of decadence in Baby Face). Since the death of the girls’ father she’s taken up with her chauffeur, Nick (Clark Gable, on loan from MGM), and along with a corrupt doctor named Milton Ranger (Ralf Harolde), who’s replaced Dr. Bell as Desney’s and Nanny’s designated physician, they’ve hatched a plot to allow the kids to die so Mrs. Ritchey and Nick can grab their trust fund. Lora learns about this when the girls’ ostensible nanny, Mrs. Maxwell (Blanche Frederici), spills the beans about the girls having a trust fund from their late well-to-do father, and she threatens to go to the police – only Dr. Ranger warns her not to. It’s only by the skin of her teeth that she’s able to get her bootlegger friend Mortie (ya remember Mortie?) to contact Dr. Bell and get him to override Dr. Ranger’s orders that are allowing the kids to get sick and die. Ultimately the children are saved, Mortie takes Lora on a date (where he asks her to shift gears and she keeps accidentally putting the car in reverse), and while Dr. Bell warned Lora that reporting Nick to the police would involve the hospital in a scandal, Mortie has a better way of getting rid of him: he tells a couple of his gangland “friends” to get rid of Nick, and in the end Nick is brought to the hospital in an ambulance, only the orderlies who unload him say sadly, “This is a case for the morgue.”

Night Nurse has one unforgettable scene in which Lora corners Mrs. Ritchey in her palatial apartment’s living room and snarls at her, “You – mother!” It’s not clear whether she’s upset at the way Mrs. Ritchey is ignoring the responsibilities of motherhood or Lora is on the point of saying something very censorable even in 1931, but either way, when I first saw Night Nurse in a revival theatre in the early 1970’s the effect of that line on the audience was galvanic. Charles said Night Nurse was one of the films I’d shown him in the VHS days that he most vividly remembered, and I can certainly see why; it’s a great Stanwyck vehicle and Blondell also helps. Before he showed the movie TCM host Ben Mankiewicz said that for years a lot of people had thought the reason for Night Nurse’s enduring popularity was the number of scenes showing Stanwyck and Blondell in their underwear, but Stanwyck disagreed and said, “It was really Clark Gable! We couldn’t take our eyes off of him!” While I’m sorry TCM’s Stanwyck marathon didn’t include one of her most underrated films, Ever in My Heart (1933) – a fascinating combination of romantic melodrama and war movie in which Stanwyck marries a German (Otto Kruger) on the eve of World War I (it’s essentially Romeo and Juliet, only instead of being kept apart by two feuding families they’re being kept apart by two feuding countries); Charles and I watched this right after the September 11, 2001 attacks and I thought it would have been a good movie to remake, with the German replaced by an Arab and 9/11 taking the place of the sinking of the Lusitania as the big event that drives her and her husband apart – the films they did include were mostly among Stanwyck’s best.