Even in the early ’30s, the burgeoning Production Code exerted enough influence on Hollywood to mediate the meaner characters Stanwyck played, which is why both Baby Face and Ladies They Talk About are somewhat schizoid about their protagonists. Lily Powers’s ruthlessness toward the bank employees she beds (her first bank beau is a young, earnest John Wayne), each of whom she discards once he’s done everything he can for her career, derives from a hatred of men that’s seated in her relationship with her father (Robert Barrat). Powers pimps her out to the cop who guarantees protection for his speakeasy; the movie implies that he’s done the same for his pals and that he’s manhandled her himself. When he blows up in his own still, the flames light up her face, her jaw set in a satisfied half-smile as she hears a neighbor comment on the hellishness of his fate. Stanwyck’s Lily is devoid of softness; sentiment is a resource she can manipulate shrewdly. Her final conquest (George Brent) takes over the bank after his predecessor, who was keeping her, is killed by one of the lovers she’s jilted; he marries her, making her respectable at last. When he begs her to sacrifice the bonds and jewels he’s given her in order to save him from bankruptcy, the revelation that she truly loves him comes as a shock to the viewer. (The filmmakers, director Alfred Green and writers Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola, manage to limn the happy ending with a bitter touch of irony.)
In Ladies They Talk About, which Howard Bretherton directed, Stanwyck plays a B-girl who lands in prison as accessory to a bank robbery. Unrepentant, she continues to help out her gangster pals from the inside, obtaining the information they need to escape from the men’s side of the penitentiary. And her response to the evangelist/social reformer (the lame Preston Foster) who falls for her and wants to lead her to salvation is to use him for her own ends and then vow revenge when she believes (mistakenly) that he’s responsible for the foiling of her friends’ prison break that leads to their deaths. Her eventual capitulation to the evangelist and to her own finer feelings isn’t any more convincing than the last reel of Baby Face. Still, Ladies They Talk About is a colorful melodrama, a few rungs below Baby Face, perhaps, but vivified by Stanwyck’s presence and by the entertaining women’s-ward scenes, with Maude Eburne as a cackling old biddy who waxes nostalgic about the brothel she operated and Ruth Donnelly as a sympathetic Irish matron who walks around with a cockatoo on her shoulder.
The best of the three movies is Night Nurse; it’s also the only one with a strong director, William Wellman, at its helm. The ginger-snap dialogue is by Oliver H.P. Garrett and Charles Kenyon, who adapted a Dora Macy novel. Stanwyck plays Laura Hart, who dropped out of high school when her mother died but has a sincere calling to be a nurse; her resolve to get what she wants, despite the lousy hand life’s dealt her, and her street smarts make her far more appealing than the saintly Florence Nightingales of other medical melodramas. The first act centers on her struggles, and those of her best friend and roommate (the indispensable Joan Blondell), to negotiate the demands of nursing training with their natural desire for a social life — and with the irresistible urge to outwit the unyielding, rule-driven superintendent of nurses (Vera Lewis).
