She's a Night Nurse and Proud of It

In many ways, 1931's Night Nurse is the type of movie critics love to ridicule. Never mind that it has memorable dialogue and memorable characters, it dares to have a sense of humor about it so obviously there must be something wrong with it.

The film starts off with a wild ambulance ride and then goes on to show us a busy city hospital. We peek at several characters in the hospital including a pair of expectant parents in the maternity ward and a Chinese family in the midst of a bilingual argument. Then we stop and focus on one character in particular: Barbara Stanwyck's Lora Hart.

Miss Hart wants very badly to become a nurse but she does not have enough academic credits to please the crusty nursing supervisor, Miss Dillon. She manages to gain the attention of Dr. Arthur Bell (played by Charles Winninger), the hospital's chief of surgery, and suddenly Miss Dillon warms to Miss Hart and agrees to let her start as a probationary nurse.

Miss Hart gets paired up with a fellow probationer (played by Joan Blondell) and even attracts the attention of a smarmy intern. But it is not until she graduates as a nurse and gets her first long-term assignment that she meets her most serious challenge.

Miss Hart starts working as a night nurse (hence the title) for two young girls, Nanny and Desney Ritchey. Both girls are allegedly under the care of a Dr. Milton Ranger yet they both show signs of starvation. The widowed mother never comes to see them and Hart has the girls to herself for the night. But she soon finds out that that is not an ideal situation.

On her first night in the house with the girls, she discovered Mrs. Ritchey to be passed out in a room across the hall. When Ms. Hart gets hassled by one of the mother's male callers, a mysterious bathrobe-clad figure (played by Clark Gable) steps in and punches out the creep, only to punch out Miss Hart as well when she tries to summon the police. This figure is Nick the Chauffeur, and it is one of the few roles I have seen thus far in which Clark Gable plays an out-and-out villain.

The next morning, Miss Hart tries to tell Dr. Ranger about the situation at Mrs. Ritchey's house, only to be scolded for acting like a troublemaker. In frustration, Miss Hart takes her concerns to Dr. Bell, and allows herself to be convinced to go back to Dr. Ranger and work undercover until she has evidence of wrongdoing.

Along the way, she makes the acquaintance of a golden-hearted bootlegger (played by Ben Lyon) whom she met while she was a probationer. Nick the Chauffeur finds out about her plans, things get serious, and of course, complications ensue.

Is this a good movie? Well, I liked it, and not just because Ms. Stanwyck and Ms. Blondell show more skin in this film than Ms. Stanwyck showed in any of the Hays-code movies in which she played an actual stripper. The dialogue is snarky, the 30s outfits Ms. Stanwyck wears are cute, and the plot actually resolves itself in an unexpected manner. The movie does stress the difference between ethics and humanity a bit much but never in a pretentious manner and I enjoyed it even when its humor came close to being unintentional.

If I had to pick the most memorable character in this flick after Ms. Stanwyck's, it would probably be a toss-up between Blondell's wise-cracking nurse and Mr. Lyon's good-hearted bootlegger. But I also have a soft spot for Charlotte Merriam's performance as Mrs. Ritchey, which is perhaps the best Harlow imitation I have ever seen done by anyone save Ms. Harlow.

Mrs. Ritchey is the type of dysfunctional mother audiences love to hate and it says something that her character manages to linger on in my mind for so long despite having some of the silliest dialogue in the movie. She laughs, she gets drunk, she shares her drinks with a dog, and she gets jealous. She talks down to Miss Hart in one scene but never even comes close to dominating her. I guess the saddest part about the Mrs. Ritchey character -- apart from the way she is so oblivious to her daughters' fate -- is the fact that I actually have known some real-life mothers who would make her seem like Mother of the Year. But that is a topic for another day.

All The Classic Movies That I Have Seen

1. Dancing Lady (1933).

One would think that a movie that stars both Clark Gable and Joan Crawford and which features performances from not only a former member of the Algonquin Round Table but also the Three Stooges would actually be pretty good.

And as long as the movie is focusing on the relationship between ambitious showman Gable and equally ambitious Crawford, the movie is not that bad.

However, in the end, it just was not my cup of tea. I suspect that I have been spoiled by both Busby Berkeley and Astaire and Rogers.

2. Thank You, Jeeves! (1936).

This is allegedly the film that first introduced actor David Niven to American audiences -- which is a big shame because this movie is not all that good. Perhaps because it was not so much inspired by the original P.G. Wodehouse books that first introduced Jeeves the definite English butler as it is by American spy movies. I suppose if you like slapstick, it is okay, but for the most part I found it a disappointment. And its use of a black character for cheap comic effect does not help matters.

David Niven played Bertie Wooster, the man who was Jeeves’s employer in the book but the way his character was written in this movie has almost nothing to do with the way the character was written by the original author. And the less said about Arthur Treacher’s Jeeves, the better. Though it does explain why Mr. Treacher is more famous today for his seafood business than for his acting career...

3. Step Lively, Jeeves! (1937).

This is just a tad better than its prequel, Thank You, Jeeves, though I can't help but find it funny that it accomplishes this by writing out Bertie Wooster as soon as possible -- David Niven apparently proved too popular to appear in the sequel so his part is played by a less-than-famous actor who does not appear on screen for more than two minutes -- and devoting the lion’s share of attention to characters that are not Jeeves. The plot revolves around the attempt by two con men to bilk Jeeves out of his hard-earned savings by convincing him that he is an heir to Sir Francis Drake. Their efforts eventually get covered in the legitimate media and attract the attention of a would-be social climber whose husband is a former gangster. The woman assumes that Jeeves is just what she needs to get the social respectability she has been so ardently craving and orders her husband to have Jeeves forcibly “invited” to their estate.

Poor Jeeves is under the assumption that his invitation is legitimate and only the con men suspect something is amiss. However, by the time they find out that they are right, they find themselves faced with the unpleasant task of having to confess all to the former gangster -- a man who is not above punishing bearers of bad news in a not-so-legal fashion. So the conflict is set. The would-be petty criminals (the con men) versus the real criminals (the former gangster and his thuggish employees) and it says something that the movie actually kept me in suspense as to which side would end up winning despite the fact that neither side was all that sympathetic. However, the movie was hardly true to the spirit of the original Wodehouse stories and certainly not something I would recommend seeing unless one is very, very desperate.

Gable and Lombard -- Together at First

So much has been said on the Net about how amoral the 1932 film No Man of Her Own is that it's almost embarrassing to note how tame it is by modern standards. True, that “Lombard on a ladder” scene -- in which a young Clark Gable encourages librarian Carole Lombard to climb a ladder in hopes of sneaking a peek up her skirt -- must have seemed risqué back in the 1930s but nowadays it seems mild compared to the average sex scene in Boston Legal or Grey's Anatomy.

True, there is a shower scene involving the film's leading lady (Ms. Lombard) but we in the audience see little of her apart from her head and shoulders. True, there is a clothes-changing scene in which another actress pauses in the act of disrobing to give all the straight men in the audience a good long view of her bare legs, but then she puts on a black negligee and we never do get a glimpse of what her uncovered body looks like above the thighs.

Finally there is the plot. True, the movie makes little effort to deny the Gable character's sordid past as a gambler and a womanizer. But then it settles for one of the oldest plot twists in the book: the old “rogue who is redeemed by the love of a good woman” twist. Gable takes his time getting reformed, of course, but he doesn't exactly protest a lot when Lombard's character insists that they get married and he doesn't even protest when she insists he work for a living. In short, for a dangerous rogue, Gable makes one heck of a pussycat.

But then if I had an on-screen wife like Carole Lombard, I'd be inclined to make more than a few sacrifices in my life as well.

No Man of Her Own marked the first and last time Gable and Lombard were together on screen. Later they would marry and it's been argued that Lombard's early death in a plane crash would forever ruin Gable for all other women. It's not a bad movie -- just a bit more sedate (even by 1932 standards) than I expected.

To put this movie in perspective, consider this: In the 1942 film Casablanca, the Bogart character Rick Blaine shows no shame in admitting -- and showing the audience -- that he hasn't exactly lived like a monk since he last saw Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa -- the love of his life. He also shows no shame in alluding to the fact that he is familiar with whorehouses. Yet he is seen as a far nobler character than the one Gable plays in this movie.

Strange thing, that moral code of yesteryear. Very strange.

All the Classic Movies That I Have Seen

1. Wife vs. Secretary (1936).

It's blonde bombshell Jean Harlow as you have never seen her before, playing an ultra-efficient secretary. And, oh yes, Clark Gable and Myrna Loy are in this movie too. Gable plays Harlow's boss and Loy plays Gable's wife. All goes perfectly until Loy starts listening to female acquaintances who fear Gable is getting along too comfortably with his secretary. Suddenly Loy gets jealous and all Hades breaks loose.

Okay, to be fair, the movie is not quite as melodramatic as the title makes it seem. And I found it hard to imagine any character played by Myrna Loy having cause to be jealous of anyone, even an internationally famous sex symbol like Jean Harlow.

And yet after seeing how quickly my own relationship with my former novia was undermined by the insinuations of mi novia's parents (mi novia would say one thing and after a five-minute conversation with her parents, turn around and say the exact opposite), I find the plot of this movie a lot easier to believe than I used to.

Still, Myrna Loy being jealous of another woman...who would have thunk it?

2. Blonde Venus (1932).

No, Marlene Dietrich isn't the most convincing actress in the world when it comes to playing German hausfraus. In fact, she seems more convincing in this movie when she puts a veil in front of her face and pretends to be a Spaniard than when she plays a loving German housewife and mother.

And one has to wonder just how serious one should take a movie in which the main romance starts off as the result of blackmail. (Oh, those oh so romantic Europeans!)

Yet this movie manages to be intriguing despite itself. Among other things, it features an early appearance by Cary Grant, who plays a gruffer character than his usual persona, and a surprising number of nude scenes (none of which feature Ms. Dietrich, alas).

Since the movie begins when Dietrich's future husband catches her skinny-dipping with her co-workers in a local pond, it's tempting to see this movie as an updated version of the old Swan Maiden legend. But Ms. Dietrich never dons any type of bird outfit in this movie. Indeed, the closest she comes to such an outfit is when she puts on a gorilla suit for a musical number.

For that matter, one can see a parallel between this movie and Ibsen's The Doll's House since like Nora, Dietrich's character is forced to do something not quite kosher in order to help out her ailing husband. Word gets out about what exactly Ms. Dietrich did and the couple separate.

Do they get together again? See the movie and find out. But, given the sentimental nature of certain scenes, you can probably guess the ending long before it happens.