Silly, exaggerated melodramatics abound in Night Nurse, yet it's fun to watch.
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In researching WB's earlier collection of "Forbidden Hollywood," I found this explanation of Hollywood's Production Code from Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell in their book, "Film History: An Introduction" (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1994, pg. 160): "Partly in an effort to avoid censorship and clean up Hollywood's image, the main studios banded together to form a trade organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). To head it, in early 1922 they hired Will Hays, then postmaster general under Warren Harding. Hays's strategy was to pressure the producers to eliminate the offensive content of their films and to include morals clauses in studio contracts. By 1924, the MPPDA had formulated a set of guidelines on subject matter that would render censorship laws unnecessary. These guidelines proved ineffectual, and Hays stiffened them in 1927 and 1930, finally cracking down with a strict Production Code in 1934." That Production Code would last for decades.
Warner Bros. have now collected together five more of their early classics made before the Production Code went into effect, boxed in a set called, appropriately, "Forbidden Hollywood," Volume 2. The five movies included here are "The Divorcée," 1930, with Norma Shearer, Chester Morris, Conrad Nagel, and Robert Montgomery, co-produced by Irving Thalberg; "A Free Soul," 1931, with Norma Shearer, Lionel Barrymore, Clark Gable, and Leslie Howard, directed by Clarence Brown; "Three on a Match," 1932, with Joan Blondell, Bette Davis, Anne Dvorak, Warren William, and Humphrey Bogart, directed by Mervyn LeRoy; "Female," 1933, with Ruth Chatterton, George Brent, Lois Wilson, and Johnny Mack Brown, directed by Michael Curtiz; and, finally, "Night Nurse" 1931, which, because it is among the best of the lot, I'll concentrate on here.
"Night Nurse" stars Barbara Stanwyck, Ben Lyon, Joan Blondell, and a fledgling Clark Gable in his first year of credited performances (he had spent the previous seven or eight years as an uncredited extra and bit player). Noted filmmaker William Wellman ("The Public Enemy," "A Star Is Born," "Beau Geste," "The Ox-Bow Incident," "The High and the Mighty") directed from a novel by Dora Macy.
The story is of a kind that just a few later Hollywood would never have made, at least not in the same way. It contains alcoholism, child abuse, attempted murder, violence, bootlegging, cynicism, and a whole lot of women parading around in their underwear.
Stanwyck plays a young woman, Lora Hart, in need of a job, who secures a position as a nurse in training at a big-city (never named) hospital. As a student nurse, she must live at the hospital, and they have strict rules: Students get one hour off each afternoon, and they have the evenings off after 7 pm. They must be back in their rooms and in bed by 10 pm., except one night a week when they can stay out until 12 midnight. Naturally, this is an invitation for the young women to go out and party and sneak back into their rooms as carefully as possible. After all, the Roaring Twenties had just recently emancipated people, especially young women, from many of their inhibitions. There is more boozing in this picture than I've seen in many other such pictures put together.
Moreover, there are probably more scenes of Ms. Stanwyck's character and her roommate, played by Joan Blondell, taking off their clothes than one would see again until the late 1960s. At one point I thought I was watching a lingerie commercial.
The majority of the story's all-too-brief plot takes up after Lora graduates and gets a job as a night nurse taking care of two little rich girls. But she isn't on the job more than a single evening than she discovers that something fishy is going on. The kids are sick all the time for no apparent reason. It appears they aren't getting enough to eat. Then there's a cranky old housekeeper (Blanche Friderici); the children's layabout, alcoholic, airheaded, party-going, socialite mother (Charlotte Merriam); and a shady chauffeur named Nick (Gable), well named because he is as no good a Nick as you could imagine, a real rat, and the beginnings of Gable's image as a tough guy.
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