Nancy Drew, Reporter

William Clemens, 1939

Nancy Drew, Reporter, released in 1939, stars Bonita Granville in the title role. The character, Nancy, is a young girl who wins a spot in a city-wide contest for high-school students. The twist in the movie is when she decides that the randomly selected topic means too small of a story for her. She switches stories with Mr. Tracy, one of the reporters employed by the paper who is never seen or heard on camera. He is assigned to report on the Lambert inquest that turns into a murder trial for Eula Denning, a friend of the family.

After hearing Eula‘s testimony, Nancy believes that Eula is being framed. This is where all her troubles start along with the movie’s many flat jokes and predictability. One of the most overly obvious scenes is when Nancy goes to the courtroom for the Lambert inquest. Out of everybody in the courtroom she sits next to the hired muscle of the movie. Next, the bad guy is given a very noticeable characteristic, a cauliflower ear, a known trait of boxers. This whole scene is one of the most overacted in the whole film. When she returns to try to submit her notes to the editor, she discovers that another newspaper beat her to print by getting their story out first. This leads her to the thought that she needs a different story to win the contest. She sets out to prove that Eula Denning is innocent of all the charges against her as the story that is sure to help her win the competition.

Throughout the movie, Nancy gets deeper and deeper in trouble so she enlists the help of everyone around her, whether they like it or not. She even has the police wrapped around her finger. She convinces Sergeant Entwhistle to go after the bad guys to cover the lie she has told to the editor of the paper to win the contest. Also, she knowingly let him put a false story in the paper in hopes that it would flush out the evidence needed to clear Eula Denning’s name. Nancy did all that while also getting the sergeant to agree to letting her and her sidekick come along for the whole thing by playing to his vanity. Her logic is that if she can make all of this work and back up all of the lies by proving that Eula Denning is innocent then everything will be fine. Nancy does truly believe that Eula is not guilty and that she is being framed; however, the main reason that she is going through all this is for her own personal gain to win the contest. She uses other people’s feelings for her against them so that they will help her get the story. Nancy is manipulative, sneaky, and smart, but in a good way because she knows when and how to use the innocent girl act in any situation. The film plays out like color-by-numbers book. After watching this movie, it seemed like director William Clemens had a big bag of stereotypes and basically emptied the bag with this movie. From Nancy’s “woman’s intuition” about Eula’s innocence and “how women just love to talk” to the Mandarin Café scene everything just came across as overacting.

Charley Thacker