NIGHT NURSE, involving child endangerment, alcoholism, murder, and Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell frolicking in their undergarments, is a great example of pre-Hays Code Hollywood
NIGHT NURSE (William A. Wellman, 1931)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Thursday, February 16, 1:00 5:15 9:30
Series continues through March 1
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
Film Forum’s excellent William A. Wellman festival continues with one of the best examples of a pre–Hays Code film, the rarely screened 1931 doozy, Night Nurse. The first of five collaborations between Wellman and Barbara Stanwyck, Night Nurse, based on Dora Macy’s 1930 novel, stars Stanwyck as Lora Hart, a young woman determined to become a nurse. She gets a probationary job at a city hospital, where she is taken under the wing of Maloney (Joan Blondell), who likes to break the rules and torture the head nurse, the stodgy Miss Dillon (Vera Lewis). Shortly after treating a bootlegger (Ben Lyon) for a gunshot wound and agreeing not to report it to the police, Lora starts working for a shady doctor (Ralf Harolde) taking care of two sick children (Marcia Mae Jones and Betty Jane Graham) whose proudly dipsomaniac mother (Charlotte Merriam) is being manipulated by her suspicious chauffeur (Clark Gable). Wellman pulls out all the stops, hinting at or simply depicting murder, child endangerment, rape, alcoholism, lesbianism, physical brutality, and Blondell and Stanwyck regularly frolicking around in their undergarments. It’s as if Wellman is thumbing his nose directly at the Hays Code in scene after scene. Although far from his best film — Wellman directed such classics as Wings (1927), The Public Enemy (1931), A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Beau Geste (1939), and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) — Night Nurse is an overly melodramatic, dated, but entertaining little tale with quite a surprise ending. Night Nurse is screening at Film Forum on February 16 as part of a triple feature with 1932’s The Purchase Price, starring Stanwyck and George Brent, and 1929’s The Man I Love, Wellman’s first all-talkie.