In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

36 The Rough-and-Tumble Wellman Five Night฀Nurse,฀So฀Big!,฀The฀Purchase฀Price,฀The฀Great฀Man’s฀Lady,฀ Lady฀of฀Burlesque In the same years she was laying the groundwork for her career with Frank Capra, Stanwyck made several films with another director, William “Wild Bill” Wellman, an adventurous teller of tall tales so rip-snortingly vigorous and “manly” that in interviews he almost comes across as a parody of a take-no-prisoners brawler. His reputation as a filmmaker has always been shaky; he made movies fast and furiously and was not always well suited to the subjects he took on. Though his filmography is filled with missteps, it also contains neglected, hardboiled classics like Wild฀Boys฀of฀the฀Road (1933) and Safe฀in฀Hell (1931), an eye-openingly sordid melodrama about a hooker (Dorothy Mackaill) who gets sacrificed to male lust and corruption. Most intriguingly, his best-known film is probably the first official version of A฀Star฀is฀Born (1937), a property that was based on the embattled marriage between Stanwyck and Frank Fay, a union that Wellman was able to witness firsthand during the filming of the first three movies he made with her. Their initial film together, Night฀Nurse (1931), is one of his best, a brutally concentrated dose of grisly working girl melodrama for Warner Bros., a studio that brought out Stanwyck’s street smart, roll-with-thepunches style. The film opens with an ambulance bringing in a car crash victim. Inside a hospital, an expectant father says he hopes he has a boy, and his wife says she’ll do her best. Wellman immediately plunges us into a world where girls are seen as expendable, which means that they’ll have to work harder for a satisfying life and even play dirty if need be. Stanwyck’s Lora Hart wants more than anything to be a nurse, but she hasn’t been able to finish high school, and so the sourpuss matron in t H e r o u g H - a n d - t u m b l e w e l l m a n f i v e 37 charge of new nurses turns her down and literally coughs her out of the building. A doctor (Charles Winninger) bumps into Lora outside, knocking her pocketbook to the sidewalk, and Wellman holds his camera low on Stanwyck’s ankles as she impatiently taps her foot. The doctor looks up: Lora’s face is sullen, closed-off. When she senses what’s necessary, her eyes flicker slightly and she smiles at the doctor, and that’s all it takes: She’s hired. This is the most restrained vamping imaginable, played as if Lora knows that men are such dopes that she doesn’t need to put any real effort into attracting them. Sex is an essential tool for the lowborn working girl of 1931 if she expects to get anywhere, and Stanwyck seems very Zen and stoically dignified about that reality. There’s a real flash of desire in her eyes—or at least a recognition of kinship—when Lora meets Maloney (Joan Blondell), a saucy, big-eyed blond who becomes her roommate. Wellman is forever contriving ways for Maloney and Lora to strip down to their lingerie so that horny interns can leer at them, but this gambit never feels exploitative because these girls can clearly look out for themselves and view the more outof -control male sex urges with detachment (Stanwyck) or amusement (Blondell). Frightened by a skeleton left in her bed by one of the interns, Lora hops into Maloney’s bed to cuddle and they keep each other warm; it’s as sweetly and suggestively dyke-alicious a bit as any in Stanwyck’s career. More happens in any ten minutes of Night฀Nurse฀than happens in two hours of most Warner movies of the forties, and Wellman thrives on the studio’s patented, jam-packed scrappiness here, as does Stanwyck. There’s room for on-the-fly inspirations, but there is also room for mistakes and carelessness, which occasionally mars even Wellman’s best work—as if lingering over something to get it right might tend to dissipate the testosterone-fueled energy he valued so highly. The men are all horrors in Night฀Nurse, either treacherous villains or patsies (either Fay or Stanwyck’s second husband, Robert Taylor, in fact), and Lora even seems disillusioned with Maloney by the end of the movie, when her pal...

Share