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With hands on waist and gaze like a laser, Barbara Stanwyck in her starched whites is a vision of working-girl fury, "Miss Iodine," a tiny tower. (The bandage on her chin only adds to her gallantry.) It opens with an ambulance ride shot as a furious POV, then a brisk string of tracking shots to flood the hospital halls with bits of proletarian life (orderlies nattering about crash victims, anxious husband pacing as pregnant wife is wheeled away, bedridden Chinese paterfamilias chewing out visiting brood). The new trainee is hard-nosed yet nurturing, sidestepping the hatchet-faced head nurse (Vera Lewis) thanks to a benign doctor (Charles Winninger) and flirting with a jaunty bootlegger (Ben Lyon) over a patched-up bullet wound. "That's my story, sister, and nothing less than a couple of cops with rubber hoses can make me change it." The first half is a headlong stroll around the clinic, with a captivating solidarity flowering between the heroine and her wisecracking roomie (Joan Blondell) as they peel off stockings and share a bed next to a skeleton. The second half is a jangling melodrama with a child being slowly murdered while in the penthouse next door the bourgeoisie lies sprawled on a bear rug with a champagne glass in hand, a blunt and corrosive allegory for the Depression if ever there was one. William Wellman's direction is a roughhewn marvel: Stanwyck reaches for a telephone and the thuggish gigolo (Clark Gable, malevolently smoldering) clenches his fist, the camera tilts down to the ground just in time to catch her knocked unconscious. It all ends well, with a triumph of amoral practicality over institutional ethics and the scrappy couple riding not off into the sunset but backwards into traffic. With Charlotte Merriam, Blanche Friderici, Ralf Harolde, Edward Nugent, and Marcia Mae Jones. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |