We find the defendants incredibly guilty

It is probably untrue that a person has not lived until they've seen "Springtime for Hitler" twenty feet high. Nonetheless, I am extremely happy to have gone out tonight with derspatchel and my mother to a late showing of The Producers (1968) at the Capitol Theatre. I had never seen the movie on a big screen and I really wanted to. It was a wonderful experience. There were maybe half a dozen other people in the theater with us; I hope more come tomorrow night. From home viewings, I would never have known that one of the showgirls in "Springtime . . ." is wearing Reichsadler pasties.

You're not much to look at, but you do have a way of showing up when you're needed

William A. Wellman's Night Nurse (1931) was on TCM a few nights ago, so I got to show it to derspatchel. I love this movie like comfort food; I saw it for the first time in 2010 when I was discovering pre-Code Hollywood and I don't care that the first half is a social realist picture about the nursing profession and the second half is a crime melodrama with all the stops pulled out from drug addiction to child endangerment, I will watch it whenever it's on and encourage others around me to do the same. It's 77 minutes long and it packs the plot in like dynamite. Where to start?

Cast, first of all. Twenty-four-year-old Barbara Stanwyck carries the show as Lora Hart, a stone-broke, freshly orphaned high school dropout determined to succeed in the medical profession despite her handicaps of education and upbringing. She's smart, compassionate, tougher than her idealism first suggests and more canny, too. As Lora's fast friend and foil, Joan Blondell's disenchanted, gum-chewing Maloney provides a more jaundiced view of the field: "I was afraid the hospital would burn down before I could get into it. Now I have to watch myself with matches." Well in advance of stardom (and his iconic mustache), Clark Gable does what he can with the film's heavy, a saturnine thug who wears his job description—"Nick the chauffeur"—like an underworld epithet, and Ben Lyon's romantic hero is a Jewish bootlegger.¹ Other character actors orbit the action and they are all exactly who they need to be.

I've said often enough that I really enjoy pre-Code movies. I like their pace, their energy, their weird mix of sensationalism and realism; I like how progressive and subversive many of them now appear simply by depicting a world that is more than the strictly delineated sum of middle-American moral approbation. (See discussion with skygiants here, including thumbnail reviews of two more movies by Wellman.) Not every one is a gem. This year alone we've seen some amazing failures. She Had to Say Yes (1933) is a guttingly direct indictment of double standards and sexual objectification that blows its kneecaps off at the last minute by trying to wrangle a happy ending out of a choice of two evils. The Purchase Price (1932) wastes the promising hook of a marriage of convenience falling guardedly in love on a slog of agricultural obstacles. I can't recommend Rio Rita (1929) for much more than the vaudeville double act of Wheeler and Woolsey, the staging of some musical numbers by Florenz Ziegfeld, and the final reel in two-strip Technicolor. And while it is excruciatingly true that all kinds of representation crashed and burned with the enforcement of the Hays Code, the years before 1934 were not all a paradise of diversity—for every refreshingly radical take on race and gender, there's an equal chance of a casually demeaning ethnic joke or a sexual stereotype taken for granted. I am still fascinated by what these films were trying to do. Or simply the zeitgeist they were running with, unexamined: however it works out, whatever the lines being crossed, many of these films are about transgression.

Night Nurse is no exception. Lora's time as a trainee nurse nearly constitutes an educational film as it follows the daily grind of a teaching hospital from the emergency room to the maternity ward to the operating theater, demystifying without disparaging the profession as it goes. Interns play practical jokes, bedpans need to be emptied, mothers of all ethnicities cradle their children with love, probationers sneak home after curfew on their nights off and criminals need patching up just like regular citizens. Graduating as full-fledged nurses, Lora and Maloney take the Florence Nightingale Pledge. Note the lines about hold in confidence all personal matters committed to my keeping and all family affairs coming to my knowledge in the practice of my calling. With loyalty will I endeavor to aid the physician in his work, and devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care. The tension between these two promises will form the narrative drive of the film's second half.

Assigned by the hospital to help care for a pair of little girls recently treated for anemia and malnutrition, Lora takes over the night shift in a swanky household and finds herself in a Prohibition-era take on the Gothic novel: the housekeeper (Blanche Friderici) is repressive and frightened, the mother (Charlotte Merriam) is a giddily neglectful socialite who passes her days and nights in a drunken stupor of parties, and the smarmy, twitchy doctor (Ralf Harolde) in charge of the case has either ulterior motives or the worst case of resting dope fiend face I've seen since Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). In place of the Byronic hero, we have Gable's Nick, a slicked-back sneerer whose brute-force sexuality briefly misleads the audience into thinking he might be a diamond in the rough (spoiler: he's just rough). And the horrid secret at the core of the house is barely hidden at all: the children aren't getting better at home. They're getting worse. They cry with hunger, they miss their mother, they're frightened of Nick. Lora isn't stupid; she knows at once that "those poor little kids are starving—anyone can see it in their faces! And if somebody doesn't do something, they won't last another month!" and neither a clip on the chin from Nick nor a threat of professional ruin from Dr. Ranger will deter her from reporting it to the authorities. The trouble is that the authorities in this situation are the rest of the medical profession and a charmed circle of courtesy and institutional power protects even a "rotten doctor" like Ranger. He's a big-shot physician with society connections, Lora is an inexperienced nurse on her first case—who does she think his colleagues will side with, if she threatens to embarrass them with her whistle-blowing? She's a nurse, a subordinate. She's supposed to keep her head down, keep her observations to herself, and obey the doctor's orders. But when playing by the rules means consenting to murder, Lora will have to learn to disregard the phony morality of "professional ethics" in favor of the real responsibility of her profession, saving lives.

As for the romance, I promised a heroic bootlegger and Night Nurse delivers. They meet cute in the ER where she treats him for a gunshot wound and doesn't file a report with the police. By way of thanks, he sends her a bottle of rye before her final exam (assisting at an operation that goes wrong, a gripping little mini-drama in itself) and a congratulatory wreath at her graduation, big as a gangster's funeral. When she runs into him between deliveries at a drugstore, he invites her to share a soda and utterly fails to convince either of them that he's given up the business. We don't even learn his name until their last scene together; until then, he calls her "My Pal" and she calls him "Hey, Bootlegger!" They are last seen driving a car together in happily screwy collaboration: she shifts and he steers. He's no knight in shining armor, but he's smart and he's dependable and he always has her back. Even loyal, streetwise Maloney warns Lora not to rock the boat and kindly administrator Dr. Bell (Charles Winninger in a mostly dramatic role with two nicely timed comic moments) advises her not to go to the police until she can prove malpractice or malice. The career criminal listens to everything Lora tells him, no matter how crazy it sounds, and unhesitatingly does what she asks.

The ending may be the sweetest instance of vigilante justice I've seen on a screen. ( I know a couple of guys. )

It's a happy ending. It dovetails the subversiveness of both the dramatic and the romantic plots perfectly. Wellman couldn't have gotten away with it three years later. I suspect he couldn't have gotten away with most of the movie.

There's so much in this film to talk about, I could be here all night. I don't want to spoil too much of the bravura scene in which Lora confronts the children's incapable mother, in the course of which she roundhouses a boozy, grabby hanger-on and sneaks profanity past the censors solely through delivery, but it's another boost to Night Nurse's insubordinate credentials: motherhood is certainly not sacred and sometimes a girl doesn't need rescuing. You can also tell the film is pre-Code because the script takes every opportunity for Stanwyck and Blondell to undress in front of one another. At one point they snuggle in bed together. Fine by me. The rest you'll have to see for yourself; it's worth it. I have to sleep, which I hope will prove similarly rewarding. This review sponsored by my fantastic backers at Patreon.

1. Okay, I cannot prove that he's Jewish, but he's named Mortie and when he needs to get milk in a hurry, he goes to a kosher delicatessen. He also breaks into said delicatessen, but it's the middle of the night and an emergency and he's out of practice with legitimate trade. I am extremely fond of him. I like to think he ended up like Joseph Linsey.