Night Nurse (Warner Bros.) is the kind of story that can be told most effectively in the cinema—a loosely constructed narrative, more informative than fictional until it veers into murder mystery for the purpose of a climax. The most interesting part of the picture is the beginning, in which Barbara Stanwyck puts on a nurse's uniform, repulses the advances of an interne, makes friends with a flip little blonde nurse, treats a bootlegger's bullet wound without putting the case on record and faints after watching someone die on the operating table. It is when she has become a graduate nurse that the picture becomes, without warning, a melodrama; but because the early sequences have made the nurse come to life as a character, there is no absurdity in this less plausible portion of a night nurse's memoirs. Engaged to care for two small children, she finds that they are starving to death, suspects a doctor's plot to murder them. Implicated in the scheme is the household chauffeur (Clark Gable) who cuffs the nurse on the jaw when she disobeys his orders. When the hero of the picture, the 'legger whom she befriended (Ben Lyon), enters the children's sickroom and points a gun at the chauffeur, audiences are likely to show a reaction which is rarely provoked in the cinema without the aid of cowboys, ropes, revolvers and Dirty Pete, the cattle rustler —to clap hands loudly and chuckle with relief. Well photographed, directed and acted, Night Nurse achieves a higher plane in the cinema than it did as a novel written for the drugstore trade by Dora Macy. This is partly because of the medium, partly because Actress Stanwyck's understanding portrayal makes the girl seem none the less charming when, in rueful contemplation of her bruised jaw, she relieves her feelings by thoughtfully murmuring, "The dirty, lousy——"
The Common Law (RKO Pathé). First essential of a problem play is a problem. Since the problem which is the excuse for this picture ceased to exist a long time ago, the play is consistently a bore. It concerns an artist's model who has had an affair with an American in Paris. This misdemeanor makes her very reluctant about marrying a painter, with whom she next becomes intimate. Further obstacles to the wedding are provided by the painter's sister, a severely conventional socialite. When the model's first lover (Lew Cody, grown a trifle fat) reappears, the situation requires the obvious solution of sixth reel matrimony. The outmoded quandaries of The Common Law (derived from a novel which Robert William Chambers wrote in 1913) cause Joel McCrea to look slightly disgruntled as the painter, provide nice surroundings but mediocre dramatic material for Constance Bennett.