Sunday, January 30, 2011

Movie review – Nurses#4 - “The Young Nurses” (1973) **

The fourth of the nurses films was directed by someone called Clint Kimborough, an actor who was given a stab behid the camera but didn’t seem to make much of a career out it. The opening sequence isn’t bad exploitation – some bikini clad nurses are sunning on a boat when they’re perved on by some blokes, who then have an accident and fall in the water… the nurses then save their lives. It’s not Germaine Greer, but at least the women are active and smart – more than Private Duty Nurses (was this the influence of producer Julie Corman? Or Kimbrough’s one-time wife, Franes Doel who was script supervisor?). There’s even an actual operating scene in which the girls participate; they want to have sex for longer than seven minutes; and there’s some feminist stuff about a pioneering female clinic.
The plots include: black nurse (Angela Gibbs) investigates a mysterious death (right on) which might have something to do with her dodgy boyfriend; a brunette (Ashley Porter, the prettiest of the three but the worst actor) romances a surgeon and has ambitions to do doctor’s work and gets involved with a woman’s clinic (the best of the plots; a blonde (Jean Manson) romances another patient who insists on sailing despite his injuries (this is a dumb plot). Why no scenes of the three together, though? The cast includes Sally Kirkland, Dick Miller, Robert Ulrich... and Sam Fuller (as a doctor)!

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