Robert Florey is a director little known today, mostly because his career was largely in B-pictures, films for the bottom half of double bills when audiences expected two films (and, usually, a cartoon and a short subject). Florey made movies until 1950, when he turned to TV. I have seen only a few of his many films but Bedside and The Face Behind the Mask (1941) are excellent B movies, each intense examinations of the dark side of the American dream, each running a little more than an hour.
Bedside starts with a shot of a man's hand on a woman's shapely leg. The man is an x-ray technician in a doctor's office and he is played by the always-sleazy Warren William. Jean Muir is a nurse in the same office who convinces William to finish his one remaining year of medical school; William accepts her loan to do so. When instead he spends the money on booze and gambling he gets a job as an orderly in a hospital where he is the only one around when a man desperate for morphine comes in looking for a fix. Williams provides it in exchange for the man's medical license and sets up as a doctor, hiring another doctor to do the actual work while William chases the female patients. Jean Muir is in love with him and becomes a nurse in his office, turning a blind eye to his womanizing and drinking until he starts romancing an opera star, a romance that his publicity man promotes in order to attract more business.
Florey's direction is swift and efficient, with low camera angles emphasizing the position of the patients in the bed, perhaps even in the grave. The film highlights how power and money can be used in pursuit of success and how publicity can be used to promote the unqualified. Florey suggests how easy it is for one in a position of power -- such as a doctor -- to abuse that power.
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