Night Nurse
1931’s Night Nurse featured Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell and was directed by William Wellman the same year as his more renown Public Enemy, starring James Cagney and Jean Harlow. Wellman later made Lady of Burlesque (aka The G-String Murders) in 1943 with Stanwyck starring as the famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (based on Lee’s autobiographical novel). Night Nurse was a rather involved pre-code tale of high school dropout Stanwyck, who trained as a nurse in a hospital alongside her friend Blondell, where she treats a bootlegger for a gunshot wound, earning his respect and admiring eyes. After taking a 
private nursing job looking after a socialite’s two children, things unravel for Stanwyck, who has fallen for the chauffeur/thug Clark Gable. Gable's death at the end provided his cinematic regeneration:immediately following Night Nurse, he starred in 1932’s Red Dust with Jean Harlow, directed by Victor Fleming (Gone With The Wind, Wizard of Oz) and No Man of Her Own with future-wife Carole Lombard; Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night with Claudette Colbert followed in 1934.
Joan Blondell, who went on to play in numerous prewar musicals and Broadway movies such as Gold Diggers of 1933 and Dames by Busby Berkeley, was also excellent in the 1947 noir Nightmare Alley, starring Tyrone Power as an alcoholic and ill-fated carny (the movie included real-life carnies and sideshow people as well). But it was the Brooklyn-born Stanwyck whose appearance in Night Nurse is of greatest note, as it is impossible when watching the film not to be reminded that Phyllis Dietrichson, Stanwyck’s greatest character, was a private nurse turned cold-blooded killer in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), starring Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff and Edward G. Robinson as Barton Keyes, reminding you to take caution if Barbara Stanwyck is your private nurse: she will either rescue your children or kill you.
1931’s Night Nurse featured Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell and was directed by William Wellman the same year as his more renown Public Enemy, starring James Cagney and Jean Harlow. Wellman later made Lady of Burlesque (aka The G-String Murders) in 1943 with Stanwyck starring as the famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (based on Lee’s autobiographical novel). Night Nurse was a rather involved pre-code tale of high school dropout Stanwyck, who trained as a nurse in a hospital alongside her friend Blondell, where she treats a bootlegger for a gunshot wound, earning his respect and admiring eyes. After taking a 
private nursing job looking after a socialite’s two children, things unravel for Stanwyck, who has fallen for the chauffeur/thug Clark Gable. Gable's death at the end provided his cinematic regeneration:immediately following Night Nurse, he starred in 1932’s Red Dust with Jean Harlow, directed by Victor Fleming (Gone With The Wind, Wizard of Oz) and No Man of Her Own with future-wife Carole Lombard; Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night with Claudette Colbert followed in 1934.
Joan Blondell, who went on to play in numerous prewar musicals and Broadway movies such as Gold Diggers of 1933 and Dames by Busby Berkeley, was also excellent in the 1947 noir Nightmare Alley, starring Tyrone Power as an alcoholic and ill-fated carny (the movie included real-life carnies and sideshow people as well). But it was the Brooklyn-born Stanwyck whose appearance in Night Nurse is of greatest note, as it is impossible when watching the film not to be reminded that Phyllis Dietrichson, Stanwyck’s greatest character, was a private nurse turned cold-blooded killer in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), starring Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff and Edward G. Robinson as Barton Keyes, reminding you to take caution if Barbara Stanwyck is your private nurse: she will either rescue your children or kill you.
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