Crime Street presents
Nancy Drew, Reporter (1939)

Director – William B. Clemens
 

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Plot
Film Notes
Cast and Production Credits

The Plot

Nancy Drew enters a high school newspaper contest and covers a trial, where she becomes convinced a young woman accused of murder is innocent. In an attempt to clear the woman, Nancy is aided by her friends Ted, Killer and Mary.

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Film Notes

Andy Hardy's Boystown for Girls

Other than the names of the main characters, Nancy Drew, Reporter has little to do with the long popular series of novels by Carolyn Keene. The second of a series, this B-film brings crime to streets that Andy Hardy could very well walk on if he was on the Warner Brother's lot instead of MGM's. It's a wholesome small town that strangely, after dark, has a sinister looking city towering behind in ghostly fashion.

And on those clean streets, Bonita Granville (Nancy Drew) is perky, very, very perky. If she were any perkier she'd be on the next train to Happy Dale in a plaid straight-jacket. She walks fast, talks fast, and drives fast. In fact, pretty much everyone in this toss away feature is at amphetamine energy levels.

And Yet...

And yet, there's still a cuteness to this little 62 minute film that can't be denied. Nancy's plaid, pleated circle skirts, Officer Tweedy's cross-dressing, Ted's platonic dorkiness, quick pacing and a nice little night-town gangster film finale add up to pleasant enough old time Hollywood viewing experience.

And of Course a Chinese Big Band

And if the above were not enough to convince you, in the middle of the film, for no apparent reason, the four young protagonists are forced to perform a musical medley in a Chinese restaurant with a 10 piece orchestra. To add to this surreal interlude, mid-song, Dickie Jones begins talking like Donald Duck with not a comprehensible word. The sequence is so out of the blue and into the pink that it somehow fits firmly within the bouncy subtext of the whole.

His Middle Name Was "B"

Ace second bill director William Clemens' middle initial was "B" and that was more than appropriate. In the 1930s and 40's, he would average around 5 pictures a year. A former editor, he could keep his little movies crisply moving. In addition to the Nancy Drew series, he also directed other series such as The Falcon and The Whistler. In 1947, at 42 years old, his Hollywood career came to an abrupt halt.

Trivial Clues

• Bonita Granville received an Academy Award nomination for A Maid of Salem (1937) and played the result of a Nazi experiment in the interesting, but hard to find film Hitler's Children(1942).
• Frankie Thomas starred on TV and radio from 1950-55 in Tom Corbett – Space Cadet.
• In 1940, a year after his role as "Killer," Dickie Jones was the voice of Walt Disney's Pinocchio. In the early 1950s Jones was the young sidekick on The Range Rider and then moved on to his own TV series Buffalo Bill Jr.

-- Ed Schneider - Alameda TV

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Cast

Production Credits

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