Night Nurse

Directed by William A. Wellman, Night Nurse follows Barbara Stanwyck’s Lora Hart as she successfully lands a job as a trainee nurse and, eventually, lands a job caring for the two small children of a negligent socialite (Charlotte Merriam’s Mrs. Ritchie). There’s little doubt, ultimately, that Night Nurse fares best in its episodic yet engaging first half, as filmmaker Wellman, working from Oliver H.P. Garrett and Charles Kenyon’s screenplay, does an effective job of establishing the affable central character and the hospital in which she toils – with the watchable vibe heightened by Stanwyck’s typically stirring work as the personable central character. (It’s clear, too, that the movie benefits from the efforts of a strong supporting cast that includes Joan Blondell and Clark Gable.) The picture’s slow-but-steady descent into tedium, then, is triggered by a growing emphasis on Lora’s exploits alongside those aforementioned children, as it becomes more and more difficult to work up any real interest in (or enthusiasm for) the protagonist’s progressively frantic efforts at saving said kids’ lives – which does, when coupled with a fairly anticlimactic finish, confirm Night Nurse‘s place as a disappointing misfire.

** out of ****