Night Nurse (1931)

Part of our series Wild, Weird, Wicked: Films from Before the Code!

In director William A. Wellman‘s engrossing drama starring Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, and Clark Gable, a nurse discovers that the children she’s caring for are murder targets. Lora Hart is an ambitious student nurse whose first assignment after graduation is tending to a couple of deathly ill little girls. Despite their posh surroundings, the girls are apparently suffering from malnutrition; their mother, Mrs. Ritchey, is a heavy drinker; and the girls’ physician is a society quack. Lora soon realizes that the doctor is deliberately starving the children to death in order to gain access to their trust fund, and that Mrs. Ritchey is kept in line by Nick, a black-clad gangster posing as the family chauffeur.