"It's that danger chasing kid again!" proclaims the trailer announcing the second Nancy Drew movie starring Bonita Granville. This time, the teen sleuth enters a newspaper contest for teens, only to get wind of an exciting murder trial. But when a mysterious man with a "cauliflower ear" smashes up her fender on the way home from the courthouse, Nancy, with the help of awkward boyfriend Ted Nickerson (Frankie Thomas), figures out there's more to this case than meets the eye. Granville had lots of uncredited work as a kid extra in pictures like Little Women (1933) and Anne Of Green Gables (1934), but here the fifteen-year-old actress shines in a junior version of the "reporter picture,"a common profession for adventurous (and autonomous) female characters in the 1930s and 40s. (Due to studio ideas of propriety, however, the lively and appealing Granville would have to wait until Nancy Drew... Trouble Shooter made later that year, after her sixteenth birthday, to kiss her on-screen love interest.)

By Violet LeVoit