Has a brilliantly modern opening of the POV of an ambulance driver and the mad dash through streets to the hospital. We had to watch it twice. Then a more conventional tale begins of Barbara Stanwyck joining hospital staff with Joan Blondell and the usual hi-jinks, though plot turns begin when she treats an injured (but cheerful) bootlegger Ben Lyon. Then things take a really perverse twist. They begin private care of two children in a rich private home. Their mother is always (nastily) drunk and the the brutish chauffeur (Clark Gable) seems to be running things, and the two children they're supposed to be looking after are being starved to death. The combination of this somewhat shocking storyline and the scenes of drunken depravity give it a hard, pre-Code edge which should never have been outlawed.
Oliver Garrett adapted Grace Perkins' novel. There's a most satisfying pay off.
Some of the direction / Barney McGill's camera are still at little rudimentary but overall the 71 minute film moves in a way that modern streaming things somehow don't.
Charles Winninger (Destry Rides Again) is the nice doctor. Stanwyck displays a nice line in defiant resistance.
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