Once to Every Woman has about everything you'd want in a pre-code medical drama: a stalwart nurse (Fay Wray) who falls for a womanizing doctor, an older surgeon who can't adapt to modern methods (Walter Connolly), a younger doctor who takes over when the older doctor falters (Ralph Bellamy), the younger nurse (Mary Carlisle) who is only looking for a doctor to marry, a young doctor (Walter Byron; one nurse says his M. D. stands for "more dames") who canoodles with the nurses on the roof of the hospital while neglecting his patients. The patients in the women's ward include all ages and sexual preferences, as the film begins with nurses bringing in bowls of water for the women to wash up in the morning.
Fay Wray is very much the center of this melodrama, written by Jo Swerling (who wrote Lifeboat for Hitchcock in 1944) and directed by Lambert Hillyer, who started directing in 1917, known for his silent Westerns with William S. Hart and a prolific director of B Westerns until switching to television in the fifties. The title of the film seems ambiguous to me but Wray's acting is effectively low-key and modern as a woman dedicated to her job but still looking for love. The film is all interiors except for the opening shot of an ambulance and gives the effect of a hospital as an all-encompassing environment for doctors, nurses and patients.
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