I devoured Nancy Drew mysteries as a young girl, and loved them. Here was a high school girl with her own car who got to solve all sorts of exciting mysteries, and she did it all on her own. Okay, maybe she had some help from her best friends George (a girl), Bess, and her boyfriend Ted — who were all also incredibly cool teenagers — but she did it without any help from adults. Except, okay, maybe her lawyer-dad Carson Drew gave her a hint or two now and then, but that didn’t really count.
I’m a grownup now, and all I could think watching 1939’s Nancy Drew… Reporter was: Gee, who knew Nancy Drew was so damn annoying?
Warner Brothers made a series of short features, aimed at young audiences, about Nancy’s adventures, all starring Bonita Granville. This installment has the meddling teen detective entering a newspaper contest for budding journalists. Interfering little brat that she is, she dumps the assignment she’s given — covering the local ladies’ poetry club meeting — and steals something more interesting from an absent reporter’s desk: coverage of a murder inquest. Of course, Nancy is utterly unconvinced that the prime suspect, Eula Denning (Betty Amann), is guilty — especially when Nancy follows that big, tough-looking guy with the cauliflower ear (Dickie Jones) from the courtroom and catches him up to no good. So she enlists her pseudo boyfriend Ted Nickerson (Frankie Thomas) and they unravel a crime that the cops bungled investigating.
Nancy has some disturbing ideas about what constitutes proper behaviour on the part of a journalist — she seems to think a little breaking and entering is okay — and she forces scrawny Ted to get into a boxing ring with Mr. Cauliflower Ear in a ruse that’s just plain wrong. I blame her father, eminent lawyer Carson Drew, who is far too indulgent with his busybody daughter. That’s how Nancy ended up so perky and enterprising — and so capable of escaping certain doom so darn easily — that you just want to smack her. People should keep their kids on a leash.
Still, though the story may be padded out with too many shenanigans involving Ted’s unbelievably annoying little siblings, this is good clean fun for kids, and an opportunity for snickering on the part of mockery-loving adults. My mocking may be a pathetic attempt to mask the dismay of my sudden disillusionment with my girlhood hero. So sue me. I hear Carson Drew is taking new clients.
This review originally appeared at the now-defunct Apollo Guide.
