Forbidden zones: War Nurse (1930), women, and the Hollywood memory of the Great War

Abstract

ABSTRACT While women working as nurses had been a staple in films with war settings since the beginnings of narrative film, the early 1930s saw a short cycle of Hollywood films which placed women at the centre of the war film. One of the first of these was War Nurse (1930), produced at MGM and directed by Edgar Selwyn. Another, a year later, was The Mad Parade, a film distributed by Paramount and directed by William Beaudine. The two films did unremarkable business and their critical reception ranged from lukewarm to outright hostile. Yet this cycle is an illuminating instance of the Hollywood system’s negotiation with the evolving public memories of the Great War. Both films were efforts to widen the appeal of the war as a film subject to the assumed interest of women audiences. They drew attention to women’s agency, their experiences and their ability to deal with male weakness and aggression, both physical and sexual, and in the process offered an alternative perspective on desire at the Front that had remained underexplored in the male adventure film. In these films the Front and the environments surrounding it were ‘a forbidden zone’ where the term was polysemic, forbidden in terms of the threat of death, sexual exploitation, and violence, but also in the promise of escape from moral strictures. In this environment, straight-talking vernacular was a coping mechanism. This chapter outlines how Hollywood scriptwriter Becky Gardner incorporated slang and wisecracking as a technique of realism and as a means of sidestepping censorship in constructing an alternative public memory of the Great War.