Once to Every Woman
A Columbia Picture (1933)
Blu-ray: Sony $26.99
I have given up even trying to guess why certain vintage films make it to Blu-ray despite their obscurity and lack of A-list stars; any Bogart, Cagney, Wayne, Davis, or Hepburn film, I can see earning a beautiful high-def release, but a minor B-picture Columbia Pre-Code soap opera with Fay Wray and Ralph Bellamy working in a hospital that seems to be just this side of criminally inept in treating patients? Well, we liked it well enough.
Miss Wray is the head nurse, and she’s dating Dr. Walter Byron, but unbeknownst to her, so are half the other nurses. Meanwhile, young go-getter Dr. Bellamy is wooing her and trying to modernize the hospital’s surgical techniques and failing with both endeavors. He’s on his own with Fay, but the issue with the modern techniques is old, cranky Dr. Walter Connolly, who is more worried about those newfangled medical procedures than he is about his patient body count.
And, since we have a little more than an hour to fill, we also get a variety of Pre-Code ward injuries, including a woman with three broken ribs courtesy of her husband, whom she can’t wait to get back home to, and a beautiful lady scalded by acid courtesy of a jilted lover. Fret not, it’ll all work out in the end. For some of our cast, anyway.
Miss Wray acquits herself well, Ralph Bellamy is his usual earnest but unimpressive “other guy” character, and Walter Byron exudes all the charm of a 3 am spider in the bathroom. Byron's career as a featured player ended shortly after this, and by the early 1940s he was assaying extra and uncredited parts in Mummy movies, where he belonged.
Once to Every Woman was written by Jo Swerling, who’d go on to pen such classics as The Westerner, Guys and Dolls, and Lifeboat; because it's talkie and the "action" takes place in very few sets, I assumed it was adapted from a play, but no, it's from a popular novel of the day. Directed by Columbia ace B-movie specialist Lambert Hillyer, but the story gave him no chance to demonstrate the flair he’d later bring to westerns or to serials like Batman (1943).
It’s a nice little dramatic picture without much flair but with a lot of heart. Sony/Columbia offers us a beautiful encoding but no bonus material, not that I can think of any I’d particularly want included, unless they added some long-trapped-in-the-vaults Columbia cartoons or non-Three Stooges comedy shorts.
