Angels of Mercy

Nurses on film get kind of a bum rap. They're either insufferably noble:

(Neagle, Robson, Oliver, Pitts - add in Dressler and you would have had a festival of comedy dowagers trying to act serious)

Or they're the biggest sluts this side of stewardesses:

It's a serious profession, but movies always seem to fall back on tired starched-cap-and-sponge-bath routines:

In some cases, it must be admitted, with apparently enough success to inspire a sequel:

This one reminds me of The Killing of Sister George - I've never gotten over the idea of bucolic country nurses biking around British villages. Our heroine here, however, is clearly more Susannah York than Beryl Reid.

This one looks like it's trying to have it both ways - noble and naughty...

But then again, so did this one, decades earlier. Still, I'm going to presume that one is not a remake of the other...

No mistaking it here - it's noble all the way; even if she were to try a little naughty - I mean, Forrest Tucker? (Although there are those miltonberleische rumors...)

Here it's hard to tell - is Stanwyck a Florence Nightingale or a Floradora Girl? (Both, as it turns out - she's a bad girl gone straight, with, as you might expect, complications - and Clark Gable as a rotter. Good stuff)

No such ambiguity here.

And, finally, the trashiest nurse of all. The next time you're in a hospital, look around at the legion of loosely clad, uncapped, be-croc'ed men and women carrying out their mostly routine, occasionally lifesaving tasks - and try to imagine them spreadeagled in ecstasy near an illicit grave.

Although the real question about this film may be: how and why did Nurse Sherri persuade the Pussycats to murder and bury Josie?