Night Nurse (1931)
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- Live-in nurse Lora Hart (Barbara Stanwyck) is sent to care for two ailing young children. As the health of her patients gets progressively worse, she begins to question the methods of the children's doctor. Eventually, Lora finds irrefutable evidence linking the doctor to a plot to murder the children. Unfortunately, it's the young nurse's word against the doctor's, and no one believes Lora. But she does have one ally - a hardened criminal named Mortie (Ben Lyon) who owes Lora his life.
- Actors:
- Barbara Stanwyck, Ben Lyon, Joan Blondell, Clark Gable, Blanche Friderici, Charlotte Merriam, Charles Winninger, Edward J. Nugent, Vera Lewis, Ralf harolde, Walter McGrail, Robert Allen, James Bradbury Jr., Jim Farley, Willie Fung, Betty Jane Graham, Marcia Mae Jones, Allan Lane, Mae Madison, Betty May
- Directors:
- William A. Wellman
- Writers:
- Grace Perkins, Oliver H.P. Garrett, Charles Kenyon
- Aka:
- Enfermeras de noche
- Genres:
- Classics, Comedy, Drama, Horror
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Reviews (1) of Night Nurse
Precode Melodrama - Night Nurse review by Steve
Delirious precode melodrama which stitches a student nurse comedy to quite a nasty crime story. Barbara Stanwyck plays a tough broad who blags her way into nursing school, and gets to hang out on the wards with Joan Blondell's cynical, gum chewing finagler. Edit in a shower scene and you've got a Russ Meyer exploitation picture.
After the girls graduate they get posted to a house of dipsomaniacs hell bent on starving to death a couple of moppets to get their trust fund. The scheme is led by pre-stardom Clark Gable as a sort of chauffeur/gangster who actually knocks out Stanwyck’s night nurse stone cold when she turns whistleblower to shut down the corrupt doctor charged with their care.
It's an unpolished but zesty performance from the star, matched by Blondell's perky, sassy insolence. It's got all the merits of '30s Warner Brothers, with proletarian scenarios and punchy dialogue spoken by wise guys. Nursing demands a pragmatic approach in this city of mobsters and if the students aren't drinking in speakeasies, they're patching up bullet wounds.
It takes some longueurs to get the scanty material to stretch to the (brief) running time but mostly this is crisply directed by William Wellman. More importantly, he gets the laconic script to crackle. Really it's just a weird potboiler, but it delivers that characteristic precode thrill of the utterly unexpected.