The Student Nurses is a 1970 American film directed by Stephanie Rothman. It was the second film from New World Pictures and the first in the popular "nurses" cycle of exploitation movies. It has since become a cult film.
Plot Four young women share a house as they study to be nurses—Phred falls for a sexy doctor, Jim, despite accidentally sleeping with Jim's roommate. Free-spirited Priscilla, who does not wear a bra, has an affair with a drug-selling biker who gets her pregnant and leaves her, causing her to seek an abortion. Sharon forms a relationship with a terminally ill patient. Lynn sets up a free clinic with a Hispanic revolutionary, Victor Charlie. The hospital turns down Priscilla's request to have an abortion, so she gets an illegal one from Jim, with the help of Lynn and Sharon, despite Phred's vehement opposition. Sharon's lover/patient dies, and she decides to join the Army Nurse Corps and serve in Vietnam. Victor Charlie is involved in a shootout with the police and goes on the run; Lynn decides to go with him. Phred breaks up with Jim, but Priscilla and she agree to remain friends. The four friends graduate together.
Cast Elaine Giftos as Sharon Karen Carlson as Phred Brioni Farrell as Lynn Barbara Leigh as Priscilla Reni Santoni as Victor Charlie Richard Rust as Les Lawrence P. Casey as Jim Caspar Darrell Larson as Greg Paul Camen as Mark Richard Stahl as Dr. Warshaw Scottie MacGregor as Miss Boswell Pepe Serna as Luis John Pearce as Patient Mario Aniov as Ralpho Ron Gans as Psychiatrist
Production
Development
The film was the second made for Roger Corman's new production and distribution company, New World Pictures, following Angels Die Hard. The idea for the movie came from distributor Larry Woolner, who was involved in the establishment of New World; he suggested to Corman that he make a film about sexy nurses. Stephanie Rothman, who went on to direct the film, later recalled:
The sub-distributors had recently had success with a R-rated film about a babysitter (The Babysitter), which had more nudity than audiences could see in films made by major studios. At that time, it was believed by the purveyors of male fantasies in films that nurses were a popular male fantasy because they were caring, and they were women who could legitimately touch men all over. [chuckles] So they requested a film be made about very pretty student nurses with as much nudity as an R-rated film could have. Roger Corman said the film:
Took shape out of a formula I had been working on for some time: contemporary dramas with a liberal to left wing viewpoint and some R-rated sex and humour. But they were not to be comedies. I frankly doubt the left-wing bent, or message, was crucial to the success of the films we would do. But it was important to the filmmakers and me that we have something to say within the films... I insisted each (nurse) had to work out her problems without relying on a boyfriend. Corman allocated the project to the husband and wife team of Stephanie Rothman and Charles S. Swartz, who had worked on a number of different projects for Corman, including It's a Bikini World and Gas-s-s-s. Rothman would direct, and she and her husband would both produce and provide the original story. Rothman:
We made it while Roger was out of the country, directing... Von Richthofen and Brown (1971), so we were free to develop the story of the nurses as we wished, as long as there was enough nudity and violence distributed throughout it. Please notice, I did not say sex, I said nudity. This freedom, once I paid my debt to the requirements of the genre, allowed me to address what interested me... political and social conflicts and the changes they produce. It allowed me to have a dramatized discussion about issues that were then being ignored in big-budget major studio films: for example, a discussion about the economic problems of poor Mexican immigrants... and their unhappy, restive children; and a discussion about a woman's right to have a safe and legal abortion when, at the time, abortion was still illegal in America. I have always wondered why the major studios were not making films about these topics. What kind of constraints were at work on them? My guess is that it was nothing but the over-privileged lives, limited curiosity and narrow minds of the men, and in those days they were always men, who decided which films would be made. Rothman says Corman hired them in January 1970. She and her husband sat down with New World's story editor Frances Doel to form a treatment then they hired Don Spencer to write the script. Rothman said Spencer did "very good work. He contributed some excellent dialogue. The attitudes, the approaches, and what happens in the piece were mostly our ideas. The way it was executed, in terms of dialogue and the tone of the dialogue, were largely his." Rothman says when she started work on the movie she did not consider it an "exploitation film".
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