When war-torn France needs nurses, a mxed bag of untrained women -- everyone from a Kansas schoolmarm (Helen Jerome Eddy) to a Brooklyn dame (Marie Prevost) -- heed the call and venture to France. Champagne-sipping vacationer Joy (Anita Page) thinks volunteering for nursing duty is a swell way to meet men in uniform, only to discover the work is dirty, exhausting and bloody, and the hazards of attending to desperately lonely soldiers are real. Getting enmeshed with a married soldier (Robert Ames) isn't smart -- but war makes men and women do funny things. An interesting mix of war drama and pre-Code women's picture, War Nurse has a frankness about the way men and women interact when life and death is on the line that wouldn't appear in more uncomplicatedly patriotic war pictures a decade later. Sharp eyed viewers will spot a screen appearance by actress-cum-gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and rumor has it scenes with young nurse Loretta Young were left on the cutting room floor.

By Violet LeVoit