The Nones of Robert Florey: Registered Nurse

Note: A moralist like me must object that this movie blurs standards of sexual propriety and professional ethics. Its plot involves prostitution, venereal disease, and undercover deception, portraying a nurse entangled with criminals. Such themes, handled sensationally for melodrama, could be seen as undermining respectability, chastity, and trust in medical professionals generally. But .. Bebe Daniels! She’s so likable she could over-charge me for a second melodrama sandwich and I’d thank her for the privilege. Bebe Daniels! Bebe Daniels!

Registered Nurse
1934 / 1:03
Tagline: “A blazing closeup of nurses in love - and the men who take their kisses!”
[internet archive]

This Pre-Code melodrama is set in a hospital with a focus on the nursing staff. The head nurse and the Mama of a brothel compare notes on recruitment and retention of “good girls” for staff. The Mama complains “Ya know, your best girls are always leaving ya, setting up in business for themselves. Sometimes right across the street.”

“It's one of those businesses that just runs itself,” the Mama says. “You know, it just rolls on and on and on.” Contrast the placid uneventfulness of a sporting house with the hospital’s churning soap opera. In a moment of indiscretion, the Mama lets on that she recognizes an intern as a patron of her “establishment,” to a nurse’s suspicious surprise. 

Not just sex, but death too. A little boy dies before he can bring his dog to visit his favorite nurse. A mother dies, survived by four small children. A young hoodlum shoots dead a policeman who was going to marry one of the nurses as soon as they had enough money.

Using this fatal shooting in support of his argument not to postpone anything in this cycle of suffering and rebirth, Dr. Lyle Talbot seduces Nurse Bebe Daniels with the tried and true line “Life is short and uncertain.” Poor Bebe is in a bad way because New York family law prohibits her from divorcing an incurably insane spouse.

“Whoever figures out these things,” observes the head nurse, “makes a hash of it,” which seems to me to be a swipe at both New York politicians and the author of all things. But cynicism and nihilism, we movie-goers know well, come with the territory in a Pre-Code picture.

The movie does not try to look like a documentary but succeeds in appearing “slice of life,” a look and feel that Warner Brothers went for in the early Thirties. Violent drunks in the emergency room. Gangsters and madams beating each other up. In the cafeteria, doctors make non-medical staff turn green with descriptions of “dirty” operations of infected organs. Nurses constantly smoking in no-smoking areas is a running joke. Nurse Bebe smacks out of control patients to enculturate American values. “Hey! Dames don’t slap me where I come from!” immigrant crook Sidney Toler gripes in an unidentifiable accent. And Bebe answers, “If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll slap you so hard you’ll forget where you came from.”

Granting the picture looks gritty enough, we still have questions about its tenuous relationship with what we laughingly refer to as reality. Did nurses really wear shoes with high heels at work? Why does gangster Sidney Toler stay in the hospital when he has only a broken leg? Was beacon of civilization New York really a state that disallowed mental incompetence or insanity as grounds for divorce?* Given that the first lobotomy in the USA was not performed until 1936, what surgery was going to cure certain psychoses in 1934? Did medical staff really don their formal wear for a party for a couple getting married? Did doctors really talk about “how far” they’ve gotten (“Have you got to first base?” “I’m still on the bench with her.”)? Was there really a cocktail called the bosom caresser “because it warms you all the way down?”

Bebe Daniels of the gorgeous voice has forlorn facial expressions that’re fetching. She has the ability to be still and yet give off energy that grabs the attention – maybe she transferred that knack from dance or the silents. Kind, clever, unstoppable - sigh. 

Sidney Toler is a gangster that the madam (Irene Franklin) calls a “big begonia.” He’s more sinister than flowering and the movie-goer can assume for him violence is the first resort. Directed by a film noir pioneer, Robert Florey, the movie is often visually striking, with odd camera angles, intense close-ups, night scenes and great use of light.

As an example of another Pre-Code element about this movie, a suicide is treated as the ghost in the machine that makes everything turn out hunky-dory. The most Pre-Code thing is that all the characters are OK with suicide tying everything up with a nice little bouquet. So the amoral atmosphere is not exactly for the kiddish at heart.

* In fact, yes, adultery was the only grounds allowed for a very long time in not only the great state of New York.