In William Wellman‘s Night Nurse (1931), the world of nursing can be an alarming and even dangerous one because of human nature.

Barbara Stanwyck stars as Lora Hart, a nurse hired to care for an alcoholic’s two ostensibly sick children.  In truth, a lawless brute called Nick (Clark Gable) is slowly starving the children because their deaths will mean financial gain for him.  It is the early Thirties, and the big city is producing small-time Al Capones and Johnny Torrios.  A bootlegger (Ben Lyon) who is sexually attracted to Lora represents moral ambiguity.  He is an inhumane man, but he helps Lora against Nick.  All of this, and the fact that Lora seems to be taking up with the bootlegger, requires that she be a strong woman, in the way that her somewhat cynical friend (Joan Blondell) is strong.  And she is.

Based on a novel by Grace Perkins, Night Nurse is blunt and engrossing, more consequential than Wellman’s The Public Enemy.  Even David Thomson, who has been unfair to Wellman, has praised it.

Crime Wave (1954 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sterling Hayden does some deliciously authoritative acting in Andre de Toth‘s Crime Wave (1954).  He plays a police detective, a man of some prejudice but mainly tough-mindedness and determination.

Three thieves rob a filling station, but a passing cop puts a slug in one of them.  This paves the way for a mini-crime wave involving murder and the kidnapping of handsome Gene Nelson (soon to be in Oklahoma!) and lovely Phyllis Kirk (an unknown to me). . . Steely stuff, this, with a fitting pace and frequently a top-notch look.  Sometimes it seems to have stepped out of the pages of Confidential magazine.

Cover via Amazon

The Warren Beatty movie, Reds (1981), is a grabber about the American pro-Communist journalist John Reed (Beatty) and his wife Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton).  Often fascinating, it is also, alas, extremely faulty, and its biggest problem is the use of real-life elderly “witnesses” who yak about the John Reed they saw and knew about.  Rebecca West, George Jessel and Will Durant among them, these people make observations that add nothing to the on-screen story, not least because they utter things the rest of us already know.

Beatty’s acting, though not memorable, is palatable.  Keaton does her best to create a character, but some of what she has to do is plainly beyond her.  Director Beatty—co-scenarist too—mostly wastes Jack Nicholson in the Eugene O’Neill role, and Paul Sorvino is sadly almost laughable.

Reds is sufficiently honest to affirm that the Russian Revolution did not liberate people; it oppressed them.  It says, in addition, that political movements are (constantly) hindered or damaged by natural complexity and human variety, even, in fact, by going against nature (as Alfred Jay Nock knew).  As it happens, Bolshevism, in its cruel determination, went not only against nature but also against people.