Night Nurse (1931)

Enjoyably seamy pre-code flick stars Barbara Stanwyck as the aforementioned night nurse, Ben Lyon as a good hearted bootlegger, Joan Blondell as your request Joan Blondell character, and Clark Gable as an evil Chauffeur. The first half hour of the film is a not particularly interesting prologe of how Stanwyck’s character becomes a nurse, meets Ben Lyon ect. (you do get a far bit of the workings of an early 30’s hospital however, which is neat to see). After this introduction the film gets into its real plot, a fascinating and seedy bit of business involving wild fifth avenue parties, starving trust fund heirs, and a coke fiend doctor named Milton A. Ranger. These pre-production code enforcements films still have an ability to shock and fascinate, they subvert our expectations of older movies and show us a more real seeming 1930’s then we’d get just a few years later when the Breen office we excreting firm control. This is a great movie to get into pre-code films with because it contains so many of that quasi-genera’s common elements, from cynical characters, to child abuse, to gangester violence, to drug and sex refrecnes, to Joan Blondell; yet the films still ‘clean’ enough that you could watch it with your mother. Thumbs Up.

See Also: Reefer Madness (1936)