William Clemen's Nancy Drew Dectective (1938)

TCM recently showed the four Nancy Drew films starring Bonita Granville, starting with Nancy Drew Detective from 1938, based on The Password to Larkspur Lane, written in 1933 by Walter Karig and attributed to the non-existent Carolyn Keene.  I never read the Nancy Drew books, preferring the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, but she is an impressively intelligent, impulsive and fearless girl as portrayed by Granville, determined to find Miss Tyson, the woman who planned to donate $250,000 to Nancy's private school and then disappeared.  It's a little unclear how old Nancy is in the film, though she does drive a car and have a mainly platonic boyfriend (Ted, played by Frankie Thomas)who helps her out, even dressing in drag to sneak into the sanitarium where Miss Tyson is imprisoned and using an old x-ray machine to jam radio signals when Ted and Nancy are locked in the cellar.

How Ted uses an old x-ray machine to send out Morse code is just one of the many contrivances and coincidences of Nancy Drew Detective that makes the film such a delight, including a gang that communicates by carrier pigeon; Nancy and Ted following a carrier pigeon in a motorcar even when it's explained  that carrier pigeons travel in straight lines; the gang holding Miss Tyson prisoner in the same area where Ted's parents are vacationing; Nancy knowing that Miss Tyson is on Larkspur Lane because the password is "blue bell" and of course larkspur is the wild version of the blue bell.

In this day and age of bloated films Nancy Drew Detective, intended as a second feature, clocks in at an efficient 67 minutes.  Director William Clemens, cinematographer L. William O'Connell (who did Scarface for Howard Hawks in 1932) and writer Kenneth Gamet worked together to create an intense film of close-ups (the low-budget was certainly a factor) that is very much of its time in many ways (including the period slang, such as "23.80," the weekly paycheck of the WPA. meaning something good) but also includes a feisty and independent female lead who goes her own way while counting on help from her friends.