The Face Knife

As well as being an excuse for routinely showing Barbara Stanwyck in her underwear, William Wellman’s Night Nurse is a comedy about ethics. It’s not for nothing that we’re shown Stanwyck’s probationary nurse Lora Hart proudly take her nurse’s oath, various doctor’s declaim about their obligations to patients and other doctors, and even bootleggers talk about what is or isn’t ethically acceptable to them. The conflict in the story is between professional obligation and personal morality, and it’s ironic that the only character in which these spheres overlap completely is the bootlegger, a swell sociopath on the model of Cagney’s gangster in Wellman’s The Public Enemy of the same year.

From taking a punch from Clark Gable to giving a child a milk bath (with stolen milk supplied by her gangster pal), Stanwyck brings her tough girl style to the role, though it’s a shame there’s not as much soft-focus heat as in, say, Baby Face. The picture is filled with vivid supporting characters, from the throat-clearing head nurse, to the pyschotic doctor with the twitchy eye, and Nick, the chauffeur, Gable in jodhpurs.

Fans of Stanwyck and pre-code comedy should definitely see this if it’s playing in repertory near you. I saw it at MoMA this weekend in a restored print. Incidentally, a MoMA membership is the best $75 value in New York City. It entitles you to a year of free admission to the museum, as well as free admission to all screenings, as well as reduced admission for guests.

I usually don’t laugh very much during Buster Keaton films (not that I’ve seen a lot). The enjoyment I get from a film like The General is not akin to that I get from most comedies; rather, it’s more along the lines of amazement or astonishment. I kind of mutely but raptly watch Keaton rapidly hop on to and off of his locomotive or leap through a burning trestle and splash in the river below or trip over a sword. The funniest moments of Keaton’s films - meaning where I’m most likely to laugh - are the close-ups, where he looks blank or perturbed or nervous, like when he accidentally shoots a cannonball straight up in the air and has no idea where it’ll come down.

The General is an acknowledged classic and I’m not going to belabor the joys of locomotive chases (though I would like to know how they did some of the tracking shots - another train running parallel?) and flaming boxcars. What I kind of want to talk about, though I have no historical backround in this, is The General’s place in the “cult of the South” that cinema seems to have in a large part aided and abetted. Keaton’s character is a southern railroad engineer who tries to be first in line to enlist when the Civil War starts. Sure, narratively he’s enlisting merely to impress his ladyfriend, but why is he Southern in the first place? Why couldn’t he be a Northern engineer? The faded romance of the lost cause of the South shows up time and a time again in the most romantic of Western characters - such as John Carradine’s gambler in Stagecoach or all the permutations of Doc Holliday. Not until John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers do we (and I haven’t seen THAT many films, so correct me) get an idea of what fighting for a morally wrong cause does to a man, the corruption of this sort of honor.

I wonder if anyone’s done a study of the depiction of the Conferacy in cinema and how it contributed to the cult of the South that still survives with the stars and bars decals and such. Clearly, there’s a good deal to be said about it.

Review of a new Keaton biography in the Washington Post, and I cannot believe i didn’t watch The Playhouse, which is on The General DVD.