Tonight's movie was "Night Nurse" (1931), starring Barbara Stanwyck, coming again from my recently acquired "Forbidden Hollywood Vol.2" collection. You might have noticed that a lot of these pre-code movies have titles that refer in a suggestive manner to women, such as "Night Nurse", or last night's "Female", or "Baby Face" and "Red Headed Woman" from the Vol.1 collection. There are many others named in this way. The reasoning was simple and had to do with the "racy" nature of the pictures. If you had a title like "Night Nurse" and a fiery star like Stanwyck, who was only 24 here, you'd have a built-in audience who'd know, in general, what to expect for their 25 cent admission price.
Director William Wellman delivers on the racy quotient, by having nurse trainee Stanwyck and her roomie Joan Blondell doff their nursing duds over and over again during the first half of the 72 minute movie. The gals keep undressing, down to their skivvies, in order to change from their uniforms to street clothes, and in the morning they change back again. The first half hour is devoted to this aspect (and nominally to the training of Barbara and Joan, at the hands of a Nurse Ratched type of housemistress), but mostly they just keep changing their clothes. Being that the year was 1931, the undergarments the ladies are wearing contain much more fabric than you would see nowdays, but still......
For early 30s audiences, it was all about the titillation. Ergo, the time devoted in the first act to constant wardrobe change.
One male character, a tall, thin orderly - a wise guy who likes to shock the nurses - keeps knocking on the door of their dorm room just as these "changes" are occurring. He always has a wisecrack to offer, slightly sexual in nature, and this too adds to the racy formula that a movie of this type was striving for.
Pre-code movies are fun, and though the sexual content is very mild in comparison to anything that was released after 1967 or so, they still present the sensation that the 1930s were a pretty swinging time. As I have previously remarked, it is the innuendo in these films that is so effective.
Most of the pre-code flicks I've seen also have a plot. At first I was worried that "Night Nurse" wasn't going to develop one, but by the 35 minute mark, a story began to form. After completing her training, Barbara Stanwyck goes to work as a private duty nurse for two little girls whom she had previously attended to at the hospital. Now she is on night duty, caring for them at the palatial home of their wealthy mother, who is plastered drunk much of the time. Stanwyck notices that the girls have gotten worse, not better, since they left the hospital. It looks like they are being starved. Their mother is drunk and partying with gowned and tuxedoed guests at what seems to be an Endless Party inside the mansion. Night Nurse Stanwyck tries to sort some order out of this chaos and finds a doctor who is supposed to be in charge of the daughters care.
Pretty quickly, however, she sees that he is ineffective at best. Worse, he might be complicit in an attempt to slowly kill the two young girls, who are heirs to a trust fund left to them by their deceased father.
Nurse Barbara uncovers the plot, but then runs into the family chauffeur, Clark Gable, tall, lean and scary in this role, bedecked in a form-fitting, flared black drivers uniform. He looks like an assassin, and he is, though he hides behind the scenes. His size and threatening manner would suggest that Nurse Barbara Stanwyck would be no match for him......but then she is the Night Nurse, dedicated to her charges, the two children, and she will stop at nothing to save them from the evil scheme of Gable and the family doctor.
The movie goes from frilly/racy in the first half to a crime thriller conclusion in the second, with a little girly-girl and nerd male comedy thrown in for good measure. Nurses and Orderlies, you know....
The director was William Wellman, who won the first Best Picture Oscar ever with "Wings" in 1929. He sure knew how to draw a performance out of young Stanwyck, who lets loose her anger in a very realistic way at the children's mother and their phoney doctor, both of whom will do nothing to save the little girls. Her performance is quite a social statement for it's time, considering that it has to do with extreme child abuse, and she gives it the force and urgency the situation demands. Her effort to save the girls is relentless and fearless, even coming up against the cold and frightening Clark Gable in his black chauffeur's uniform. In this way the movie is ultimately of great substance, after a trivial start.
Because of the last half, in which the story is fully developed, and because of the lead performance of Barbara Stanwyck (and also her supporting cast, which includes many great characters I have not mentioned), I will give "Night Nurse" Two Thumbs Up.
See it for Barbara's performance, and for it's 1930s style, and for the changing of the lingerie...
And for the plot, which, in a movie only two years into the advent of sound is not as technically proficient as would be a movie made decades later, but which tackles a subject that would likewise not be taken on for years to come, and does so without flinching.
Here's to the Pre-Code once again, in all it's raciness and truth-telling glory (and it's pure entertainment value).
That's all I know for tonight. My day was otherwise routine. I hope yours was good.
Much love until tomorrow, then more to come. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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