If you’re half as desperate for “escape” as I am, you’ll welcome the opportunity to take a 4-hour B-movie bath, courtesy of YouTube, in Nancy Drew, Detective (shown above), Nancy Drew, Reporter, Nancy Drew, Trouble-Shooter, and Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, a sometimes delightful and often at least satisfying mini-series of sorts cranked out by Warner Brothers back in the late thirties.
B-movies were short (usually 1 hour), quick, cheap films cranked out literally by the hundred by the big Hollywood studios back in the day, usually for kids Saturday matinees, or double features, or triple features, or whatever. The first and the last of the four Nancy Drews are terrific, planting me firmly in B-movie heaven with their frenetic plot twists, cliched characters, and wah-wah-wah humor, not to mention a few seriously subversive gags that the censors either slept through or winked at. The middle two suffer, it is true, from a number of unfortunate lacunae, lapses, and longueurs, but both are also mingled through with moments of undeniable piquancy and charm—though, of course, for some, a little piquancy goes a long way. But I am not one of those.
The Nancy Drew films are, of course, based on the famous series initiated back in 1930 by teen mystery meister Edward Stratemeyer, attributed to the non-existent Carolyn Keane. You can, almost surely, obtain all that you want to know—and more than I want to know—about the redoubtable roadster-driving, Titian-tressed, impeccably dressed Nancy from the Nancy Drew website. I do know that Nancy is perennially 16, lives in River Heights with her widowed father Carson Drew, along with devoted housekeeper Hannah Gruen.
I never read a Nancy Drew—they were for girls, after all—but I had girlfriends who did, and I have read a little about Nancy, and one of the more interesting/piquant things I learned is that, though only 16, she is perhaps River Height’s leading hostess, thanks to Hannah’s assistance in planning and executing a never-ending series of stunningly successful dinner parties, which are, I guess, the most sought-after invites in town.
So what do we have here? A bit of an Electra complex perhaps? Mommy just wasn’t needed any more, so Nancy edged her out. She’ll be taking care of daddy from now on. This will come up later.
The one thing that holds all four of the “early Nancy” films together, longueurs or no, is the consistently excellent performances turned in by the leads, Bonita Granville as Nancy, Frankie Thomas as boyfriend Ted Nickerson, and John Litel as Carson Drew. Unfortunately, they’re sometimes let down by clumsy, dilatory plot twists that fail to generate any tension, excitement, or amusement, in part because Nancy, being “only” a 16-year-old girl, can’t engage in any form of serious fisticuffs, not to mention gunplay, and the same can be said for Ted. It’s not surprising that in both Nancy Drew, Detective and Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, there is a touch of actual violence—though, of course, no one actually gets hurt.
Whoever provided the writeup in Wikipedia for the four films—clearly a fan of the books—does not think much of Bonita: “Granville's portrayal of Nancy showed her as a ditzy and absent-minded schemer”, in contrast to the “real” Nancy— “intelligent, sharp-tongued, and quite ahead of her time.” Well, color me ditzy, or whatever else you damn please, but I disagree entirely. I find Bonita’s Nancy an utterly charming 16-year-old Katherine Hepburn, minus all the la-di-da Bryn Mawr lockjaw. Granville, only 15 when the series started, in 1938, does a terrific job in the series, displaying endless gumption, Moxie, spunk, and spirit throughout. She’s not “absent-minded” at all, and if she schemes, well, so what? She schemes for truth! Ugottaproblemwitdat?
In the opener, Nancy Drew, Detective, Nancy kicks things off in proper Nancy style by chairing (of course) “the committee” at the let’s face it la-di-da Brimwood School for Young Ladies—the Committee for Receiving Big Bucks from Prominent Alumnae, apparently, because Nancy introduces old biddy Mary Eldridge, who promises the girls a cool 250 grand! What’s more, she’s letting the girls decide what the money will be used for. So what was the verdict? A science building, a library, an arts center, or an administration building?
“A swimming pool!” the gals bellow in unison. Did you have to ask?
So it’s settled. Miss E and her business manager, Mr. Hollister, will meet with Mr. Drew at his office to hand over the check and make sure everything’s legal. But then, later, Hollister arrives, alone!, and awkwardly, suspiciously “explains’ that Miss Eldredge, well, she’s left town, that’s all, without giving him the check or any sort of explanation. And she doesn’t’ want to be disturbed. So, you know, that’s the end of it. These things happen with old ladies, you know. They can be eccentric.
Well, fuck that shit, says Nancy. (Figuratively, of course) I want my damn swimming pool!
Later, we see Nancy, chic in hat and gloves,2 driving her roadster (a Ford, I’m guessing, though I don’t know for sure) when she passes old Doc Spires (Brandon Tynan) driving the other way and gives him a friendly wave. But then, in her rear view mirror (Nancy has very sharp eyes) she spies the old man being stopped and then hustled into another car that takes off at high speed! Nancy makes a one-eighty and follows in hot pursuit, only to be foiled by a blow-out. Damn! But, later, when Nancy and Dad are at home (which is seriously ab-fab, by the way), Dad gets a call from Doc, who tells him that, guess what, he was kidnapped! And blindfolded and taken to a big house with a guard at the gate! Who lets them in when the driver said “Bluebells”! And when he’s taken inside, he’s asked to care for an old broad with a bum shoulder! Hey, was the old broad Mary Eldridge? And was “Bluebells” a password? I’ll bet you $23.80 it was!
So what’s the deal with the twenty-three eighty? According to the internet, this meant “I’ll bet a week’s pay”, because $23.80 was a week’s pay under the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, which employed millions during the Great Depression. I can wonder if some big shot connected with the series worked for the WPA, possibly in the Federal Writers Project, which employed thousands of writers,3 because it’s a running gag through all four pictures, and something I’ve never heard before.
There is tons more fun to come as Nancy and Ted, who eventually shows up, get their hands on an errant pigeon, a carrier pigeon with a band on its leg and a little tube for carrying messages, containing a message that’s “piquant”, to say the least: “shoulder okay, bluebells.” Does that ring any “bells”?
Ted, it seems, is quite the nerd of all trades. He knows that all carrier pigeons are registered with the American Pigeon Club, using the number engraved on the band4 and he’s a “ham” radio operator with his own broadcasting equipment, so he can broadcast to find out if anyone—anyone who is a fellow ham, of course—is missing a pigeon.5 While he’s doing that, Nancy will check with Dad to see if he can wire the APC to identify the bird’s owner. She takes off, handing the pigeon to Ted. “Why give me the bird?” he asks, which likely got “knowing” laugh from the crowd, because giving someone the bird meant making a, well, fart-like sound by forcing air out of your mouth while sticking your tongue out at the same time, an expression of scorn supposedly resembling the hissing of geese.6 It did not mean, at the time, giving someone the finger—at least I don’t think so.
Unfortunately, the APC doesn’t come through, so Dad tells Nancy to crate the pigeon and deliver it to the police. Well, fuck that shit, says Nancy (again figuratively), and, when she returns to catch up with Ted, she interrupts his broadcast with a better idea: let the pigeon go and they’ll follow him!
Well, it works, eventually, thanks to some pretty sharp sleuthing on Nancy’s part, while looking pretty damn sharp in a smooth pair of slacks that are very Kate Hepburn. (They’re in the country—“Sylvan Lake,” where Ted’s family has a cabin—so it’s okay.) The actual denouement is a bit uneven, taking place in an old rest home, with Ted in drag as a nurse and Nancy in a very dubious “mourning” outfit—exactly why isn’t clear—that to contemporary eyes is almost indistinguishable from a burqa. For Laurel and Hardy buffs, there’s a good inside laugh when Mae Busch—the “ever popular Mae Busch”—turns up as a tough nurse keeping the old lady quiet.7 When the kids get tossed in the cellar, Ted finds an old X-ray machine, which, okay, could have been there, and which, when turned on, disrupts radio broadcasts, allowing Ted to send Morse code messages by turning the machine on and off. Nerds rule, n’est-ce pas? Eventually, broadcasters figure out what’s going on, and, when the police show up, Nancy manages to grab a gun and start shooting, hitting no one, of course, but causing the hoods to scatter and allowing the cops to collar them with ease. Best of all, Nancy gets her damn swimming pool!
The many twists and turns of Nancy Drew, Detective, however far fetched each step may be, do achieve a certain coherence, an overall unity of design that might obtain a certain measure of grudging acceptance from old Aristotle himself if he were feeling generous, though he doubtless would object to Nancy’s frequent assertion of the superiority of the female sex, including such lines as “Statistics show that between the ages of 15 and 20 women are mentally 5 years older than men”. And for the first half of its length, its successor, Nancy Drew, Reporter, follows surely in its footsteps, only to fall apart in most ghastly manner going down the stretch.
The kids in Nancy’ journalism class have been given the chance to each write a story for the River Heights Tribune and the student who submits the best story gets $50! And a “gold medal”! Well, say “gold medal” to Nancy Drew and she is on it! Suitably crusty city editor “Bostwick” (Thomas E. Jackson) is suitably unenthused by the kids and sends them all out on a variety of banal assignments to get them out of his hair as quickly as possible, Nancy drawing an afternoon reading courtesy of the “Ladies Amateur Poetry Club”! Ladies! Amateurs! Poetry! What kind of sissy shit is this?
Naturally, it’s sissy shit Nancy won’t stand for. She wants her damn gold medal. “You’re just trying to get rid of us,” she tells Bostwick, to which he replies: “My dear Miss Whosis, with regard to your supposition I see you are not without perspicacity.” Well, Nancy has plenty of perspicacity, not to mention, as I said before, gumption, Moxie, spunk, and spirit, as well as plenty of get up and go, and she gets up and goes and quickly manages to con herself into covering a murder! A murder! Now we’re getting somewhere!
Naturally, she needs Ted’s assistance in all this, but when she does we quickly run into a pair of clinkers, in the form of Ted’s “kid” sister Mary (Mary Lee) and her playmate “Killer” Parkins (Dickie Jones), cliched B-movie brats who make unfunny wisecracks and generally “cause trouble”. Mary is particularly problematic because she’s supposed to be around 10 years old but looks almost as old as Nancy (actually, 15 versus 16). Fortunately, we get rid of them quickly, and Nancy also has the satisfaction of breaking up Ted’s tennis date with an older “woman”—described as such because she’s 18. It’s a very odd plot twist that’s quickly discarded—we never meet her—leaving us to wonder why it was ever introduced.
We can wonder a lot more about a scene that follows Nancy and Ted’s day of sleuthing, which focuses on a bad guy and his moll, who clearly are up to no good. Dad arrives home late after a long day at the office (never explained) to find Nancy already in her nightgown and bathrobe. Nancy, of course, has to fill Dad in on all the events of the day, chattering fiercely away as she follows him into his bedroom, and then even into his bathroom, where Dad takes off his shirt, revealing an unlovely wife-beater, before brushing his teeth and washing his face. Nancy continues to chatter, sitting on what is obviously the toilet, though of course we never actually see it. Dad finishes his ablutions and reaches blindly for a towel. “Dad!” Nancy exclaims. “Those are my stockings!”
Uh, Nancy, what are your stockings doing in Dad’s bathroom? Things get even more problematic when Dad hoists Nancy in his arms and carries her off to her bedroom, which has its own fireplace, and deposits her in her canopied bed. Fortunately, he then departs, after kissing her on the cheek.
After this, um, disquieting scene, the picture slides seriously out of control as the writers hit us with one miserable cliché after another—Ted engaging in some “double talk” (a mélange of real words and gibberish that conveniently baffles the listener), Ted forced to participate in a painfully cliched movie boxing match to avoid blowing his “cover”, some tedious impromptu “entertainment” from the kids to pay off a restaurant check, including a seriously creepy performance from no talent Mary Lee, trying to act all grown up and “hot” and failing miserably, and, worst of all, an endlessly protracted and DOA denouement that seemed to me to consume at least an hour of screentime, even though it’s more like 15 minutes.
Nancy Drew Trouble Shooter is a similarly mixed bag, Dad going out to the country—Sylvan Lake, again—to defend a cousin, Matt Brandon, charged with the murder of a dude named Henry Clark, a neighbor he’d been feuding with for years, a murder charge the local sheriff thinks he can make stick even though Henry’s body hasn’t been found. When Nancy and Dad arrive. well, we have to wonder if the trip was worth it. We encounter, among other things, some painfully racist “humor”—black actor Willie Best8 as “Apollo” Johnson, trapped in a tediously demeaning role and receiving absolutely no help at all from the script. On the up side, we see Dad’s luxury convertible—probably a Cadillac or a Packard—and some pretty delicious sexual tension between Nancy and this, this woman—Edna Gregory (Charlotte Wynters). Nancy can see right through her, of course, but Dad keeps acting strangely whenever he’s around her. Snap out of it, Dad! Right now!
Well, Dad isn’t listening, at all!, so Nancy has no choice but to enlist Ted’s assistance—his family is summering at the lake, of course—in dealing with this, this “terrible woman, this scheming adventuress”. Later, there’s some rather heavy-handed humor as Nancy tries to prove that she can “out cook” Edna—poor Nancy running around a rustic kitchen making a mess of things, when she should be out kicking ass and taking names in the name of justice! That’s her forte, not pot roast and potatoes!
Things go from bad to worse for Nancy when Edna shows up to “help”, not only embarrassing Nancy with her confident culinary craft but setting both Ted and Dad vying to help her at every turn! “Vacation”, hell! It’s “Vacation Hell”!
Fortunately, we get a break from all this nonsense when Nancy’s botany skills allow her to identify a “rare tropical plant”—“Arbensis”—and she sends Apollo to dig it up. When he does so, he discovers a corpse buried underneath it! Poor old Henry! The missing “corpus delicti”! Which means that whoever buried him must have inadvertently dropped an Arbensis seed on the ground when he did so! And, wouldn’t you know it, Clint Griffith, the deceased’s partner, raises Arbensis!
In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any rare tropical plant named Arbensis, though several dozen plants do have “Arvensis” (Latin for “of the fields”) as a species name. But, no matter. We get more sleuthing, most of it fairly pedestrian and some of it tediously racist, before the airborne denouement, which ends happily, thanks to Ted’s favorite bedside reading, “How To Fly A Plane”.9
Along the way, the Edna menace is dispensed with with surprising directness. Carson actually proposes to her, but she tells him Nancy would never stand for it. He’s sure he can persuade her otherwise, but when he goes to explain things to her he overhears Nancy telling Ted furiously that she would never spend one night under the same roof as Edna. Well, that does it. Nancy’s rules, and Nancy rules. Hell, when you come to think about it, he kind of likes masturbating! And if things get too tough, he can always dry his face with his daughter’s stockings!
With the fourth and the last of the series, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, the kids are totally back in stride, with what is surely the best of the four, which includes the most elaborately “set up” subversive gag I’ve ever seen.
The plot involves an inheritance, a mansion owned by two old biddies that will be given to the River Heights Children’s Hospital, thanks to Nancy’s advocacy, if, and only if, the two remain in the house for another two weeks, for some reason. But then their chauffeur is found shot dead in his room. Suicide or murder? “I can’t stay in this house for another minute if it was murder,” says one of the biddies. What to do? After arriving on the scene, Nancy quickly, surreptitiously dictates a “Dear John” letter to Ted and then plants it in the chauffer’s room. See, his girlfriend left him! Suicide, definitely! It’s okay, biddies! You can stay!
Of course, Nancy knows it was not suicide, because earlier that morning some thug barged his way into the Drew home when Carson wasn’t there and stole the “affidavits” (which prove something or other). When the guy puts his hand over Nancy’s mouth to keep her from screaming, she bites him, hard, and kicks him in the shin. Ted arrives just in time, delivering ice (it’s his summer job), and his presence convinces the bad guy to beat it.
Whether a household as wealthy as the Drews would still have an “icebox” in the late 1930s, requiring a delivery of a large block of ice every several days, is seriously problematic, but as far as Nancy is concerned, what’s “problematic” is Ted having such a working class job! She was hoping for something more “genteel”! “It’ll help me get in shape for football this fall,” Ted explains.
Delivering ice was, in fact, considered a serious muscle job back in the day, and the thought of strapping young lads delivering heavy blocks of ice to, you know, lonely housewives, provoked a lot of seriously off-color humor back in the day, humor that never would have been allowed on the screen until the late 1960s. Among the funnies: “Has the iceman come yet?” “No, but he’s breathing hard!” This was the source of the title of the famous play by Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh.
Nancy discovers that delivering ice has its perks, allowing them to enter houses more or less at their discretion, in River Heights at least, which is how they get into the biddies’ home. After the police buy the suicide story, Ted and Nancy can give the chauffeur’s bedroom a serious going over, and, naturally, Nancy finds a clue, a spent cartridge!
“Give me your belt, Ted!” Nancy commands.
“My belt? What for?”
Well, to measure off the distance between the location of the cartridge and the body (already removed). Couldn’t Nancy have just paced off the distance herself? Don’t ask questions. There! Four and half lengths. Now, if we only knew what kind of gun it was, we could test it, and see where the cartridge would land when the gun was fired. Fortunately, Ted’s a bit of an expert when it comes to these things, and, after inspecting the cartridge, tabs it as coming from a Lueger. Not only that, his uncle has one, and he’s sure he’ll be able to borrow it!
Ted brings the Lueger by the Drew’s home early the next morning, leaving a note saying he has to do his route first, to avoid being fired. When he arrives at the ice house to start his run, he gets word that some big shot wants 500 pounds of ice for a party delivered immediately, and has requested that Ted deliver it personally! This could set him up for a promotion! But when Ted gets to the address given, he’s out in the middle of nowhere, no house, no party, no nothing. Nothing, that is, until Nancy shows up. See, you can’t shoot off a gun in the city limits, and waiting all day to test the Lueger might be too late!
“Take off your belt,” she commands Ted.
“But my pants might fall down.”
“You only need one hand to fire a gun, don’t you? Hold them up with the other hand.”
Ted complies and Nancy uses the belt to measure off four and a half lengths. Ted fires off five rounds, aiming at a sign at the top of a nearby hill.
“See,” says Nancy triumphantly. “The shells fell right at your feet. It couldn’t have been suicide!”
Ted wants to check his marksmanship, so he hikes up the hill to inspect the sign, but when he turns it around he gets a shock, because the sign reads “Hunting Prohibited”! Almost immediately, they hear a siren.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” shouts Nancy, jumping into her roadster. But Ted, his pants down around his ankles, can’t get down from the hill in time. A cop arrives posthaste on a motorcycle.
“Who are you?” he yells at Ted.
“I’m the iceman,” Ted tells him.
“Yeah?” says the cop, staring at Ted’s feet and chuckling.
Later, there’s more fun when Nancy catches Ted chatting up the biddies’ maid in the kitchen, telling her “jokes” like “Do you know the definition of a duck? A duck is a chicken wearing snowshoes” while she guffaws. Why, Ted Nickerson! Getting familiar with the help? That’s coarse, common, crude, and vulgar!
There’s still more fun (eventually) when Ted and Nancy are trapped in a tunnel, accessed through the “hidden staircase” of the title, with the bad guy, the biddies’ next door neighbor who intends to use the biddies’ property and his own as the site of a racetrack.10 When the bad guy shows Ted grapples with him, but it’s Nancy who administers the coup de grâce, smacking the dude over the head with the heel of her shoe! (For some reason, this was the only socio-culturally acceptable way for a woman to knock a man out prior to WWII, perhaps because the use of the heel makes it “feminine”.)
Even with the neighbor subdued, they’re still not out of the woods, because the tunnel is filling with water, thanks to a ruptured pipe, but Ted, relying on his knowledge of hydraulic mining, is able to twist the pipe upwards, blasting away the soil above until it collapses beneath the feet of bumbling Police Captain Tweedy (Frank Orth), whom I’ve more or less forgotten about until now. Freedom!
Sadly, that’s the last of the Bonita Granville Nancys. Granville, though she continued in films until 1950, never really became a star, and I doubt very much if any of her adult roles have the youthful, rambunctious vitality of these early, carefree films. Where are the roadsters of yesteryear?
Afterwords
In 1977 a Nancy Drew TV series appeared, alternating with the Hardy Boys. These are also available on YouTube as well, but I found the one I sampled to be typical 1970s TV—that is to say, deadly. Back in those dreary days there was no cable. You watched what NBC, ABC, or CBS had in store for you, or you watched nothing. Hour-long shows like Nancy Drew typically had 15 minutes of plot and 30 minutes of filler and 15 minutes of commercials. It is “interesting” that the comments on TV Nancy—from old fans, of course—are ecstatic, proving, I guess, that some people will watch anything.
But wait! There’s Still More!
Want to hear a take on Nancy Drew, Detective from someone who’s an expert on all things Nancy and is about 50 years younger than I am? You are most definitely in luck! “Snughly” maintains a YouTube channel dedicated to Nancy Drew video games, which appear to be quite the thing, or at least quite a thing, and she contributes an absolutely hilarious review of Nancy Drew, Dectective, howling with delight at the bizarre artifacts of the distant past: “Look at her car! It’s huge! She looks like a doll!”
1. Okay, not in so many words.
2. Nancy always wears hat and gloves when she’s out and about in the city. She wears at least six different hats in the course of the one-hour picture.
3. In their remarkable study, Jackson Pollock: an American saga, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith describe the happy life of not quite starving artists working for the WPA. They could do their quota in about of week, allowing them to spend the rest of their time hanging out and arguing about “art” and working on their own stuff, which, naturally, they were not going to give to the government. Sure, they were poor, but that only proved they were real artists!
4. Carrier pigeons were used to carry important messages as recently as the First World War.
5. According to Wikipedia, an amateur radio operator was called a “ham” using slang going back to 19th century telegraphers, when a clumsy operator was dismissed as “ham fisted”. Ham radio, a bit unbelievably in these days of smart phones, is still a thing.
6. It was also called, onomatopoetically, “the raspberry” and metaphorically “the Bronx cheer”. It was referenced as “the bird” in popular literature certainly in the 1920s and probably later. I suspect that it was only after World War II that it obtained its modern connotation.
7. Mae frequently appeared with Stan and Ollie in tough broad roles. Back in the fifties, Jackie Gleason used to get big har-de-har-har laughs referring to her as the “ever popular Mae Bush”. I’ve read that Mae inadvertently broke up a romance between silent comedy legends Mabel Normand and Mack Sennett when Mabel caught them “rehearsing” in, yes, the bushes.
8. Best was one of the very few black faces visible in early 1950s TV, appearing in the Trouble With Father sitcom, which I remember seeing in Saturday morning repeats. According to the Wikipedia writeup for Best, producer Hal Roach thought very highly of Best and used him as frequently as he could. Another actor on the show, child “star” Sheila James, later became California’s first openly gay state legislator.
9. Actually, they do crash, but Ted and Nancy prove as indestructible as “the Rock”.
10. Racetracks seem to have been considered surefire goldmines back in the day. In the W. C. Fields’ classic, It’s A Gift, Harold Bissonette is able to enjoy the orange grove of his dreams by selling some rundown property to be used for the grandstand of a racetrack.
