Short Attention Span Review - Night Call Nurses (1972) - With Candy Striped Spoilers

How can a movie titled Night Call Nurses be bad? On the hand, how can it be good? Maybe it is neitehr; it just is.

Synopsis

Three hot nurses - brunette babe Barbara (Patty Byrne), blonde bombshell Janis (Alana Hamilton) and black chick Sandra (Mittie Lawrence) - are working in the psychiatric ward of a Los Angeles hospital. They have to deal with suicides, drug abuse, flashers and a variety of other nutjobs. Off duty, they party, Barbara goes skydiving, Janice likes to water-ski, have sex, including with patients (Janice hooks up with drug-using trucker Kyle (Richard Young)) and Sandra gets involved with a Black Power revolutionary group; in other words, normal nurse stuff. Barbara is stalked by someone at the hospital and sleeps with her creepy therapist, who is also trying to drive her crazy as part of some ill-defined experiment. Sandra agrees to help Black Power leader Sampson (Stack Pierce) escape from the hospital with the help of Janice and some of his friends in the underground, including Jude (a great Felton Perry) who also hooks up with Sandra. The film ends with a shoot-out, a car chase, truck driving under the influence of every drug known to man and Barbara having it out with her therapist, while at the same time finding out who her stalker is. The final scenes are of our trio happy and reunited. THe last image is of Sandra giving the Black Power salute. The end.

Analysis

For a short movie - 74 minutes - a lot happens. In addition to the events in the synopsis, we also see a couple of drug-induced hallucinations, an epic mental break-down by Barbara, casual racism from cops, a guy pull a bundle of dynamite out of his coat (in a sequence in which there is no reason he'd have that or be able to fit it in his coat)...and a ton of nudity. I think every female actor under the age of 30 takes her top off in the film.

Watching it, the film reminded me of a season's worth of plot devices for Grey's Anatomycondensed into one film with the inclusion of nudity. So, basically, what shows like Grey's should be doing.

The acting is okay - although some of the more "comedic" bits do not work, due to both the writing and the lack of comedic timing on the part of the cast. The film has some nice visual touches. The hallucination sequences are more amusing than psychedelic - Kyle sees his hand turning into mirrors - but are pretty neat in a low-budget way. A suicide that kicks off the film is well done, showing the destruction of a baby doll as a stand-in for what is happening to a young woman who jumps off the hospital roof. While the film is hampered by the budget and time constraints (the film was made in 15 days for $75,000) it doesn't look particularly bad or cheap.

Although there is nudity and the film could be seen as an excuse to show tits, there is more going on. While the story is disjointed and has wild tonal shifts (farcical humor is juxtaposed with graphic violence) it all kind of makes sense by the time the credits roll. While character motivation is lacking for a lot of things that happen, it is no worse than the medical melodramas you find on TV.

The movie lightly pushes boundaries in terms of sexuality. With loosing restrictions on what you could show on screen, films like this - one's that showed female nudity, on-screen sex and reflected loosened sexual mores - became mainstream. Of course, at the same time, there was a growth in pornography - and, briefly, of porno chic - that showed far more than a soft softcore film like Nurses. As an artifact of an era in which what was allowable on the screen was expanding, Nurses is valuable as an example of what filmmakers were putting on-screen. This is particularly true when you consider that even a few years earlier female nudity in a movie would lead to controversy and, often, censorship.

It's also interesting to see just what the filmmakers thought was "hip" and important to audiences in the early Seventies. Drug use, racial tensions, contempt for authorities, casual sex, the rise of the therapy culture, criticism of healthcare costs, and the empowerment of women (mostly being empowered to have lots of sex) are all themes that run through the film.

Verdict

Night Call Nurses is surprisingly fun. While the acting isn't great and the story has a very episodic quality to it that detracts from coherency, overall it is a competently made, entertaining movie. I don't want to oversell it; this is no masterpiece of cinematic storytelling. But, it is worth checking out. Plus, the female leads are all pretty hot and not afraid to show off their boobs. So, there's that too.

Awesome trailer. Simply awesome.