Nancy Drew/Crazy Love: Dames aflame

Teenage sleuth Nancy Drew debuted in 1930 as a kind of flapper Agatha Christie in cloche hat and blue roadster. That icon of all-American pluck is revisited in the screen version of Nancy Drew, where the cutie-pie crime fighter is played by American Girl living doll Emma Roberts (spawn of Eric, niece of Julia).

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Director Andrew Fleming and screenwriter Tiffany Paulsen’s retro-chic, New Sincerity Nancy is a locked-in-time 1950s teen with a yen for sweater sets and kneesocks amid the spoiled Bratz teens of Southern California.

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Nancy Drew opens in the kind of Norman Rockwell town of spiffy colonials and wholesome teens that suggests Blue Velvet territory scrubbed free of menace.

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Leaving such cartoonish normalcy behind, Nancy’s lawyer dad takes a job in L.A., where the father-daughter chums face time-warp culture shock in an equally cartoonish La La Land.

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Despite being sworn off sleuthing by her dad, Nancy chooses a haunted mansion for their new residence, where she hopes to unravel the mystery behind the Natalie Wood-style ’70s actress Dehlia Draycott (Laura Harring), who once lived there.

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Just as the book character was prone to change with the times, getting wardrobe, speech and automotive updates where necessary, this screen Nancy is also a product of her age. Though willful and independent like the original book heroine, in this comic revisionism, the ’50s-style teen is an anachronism plopped like a guppy into a fishbowl of contemporary teenage sharks. A tribute to the ’50s as the pop-culture birthplace of teens, this Nancy Drew is a humorous antidote to the contemporary media-generated vision of the teen status quo.

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Though often formulaic and mildly intrigue-bogged in the manner of a tween “Murder She Wrote,” Nancy Drew’s one saving grace may be the sight of such a self-actualized, motherless tween expressing the kind of agency and devotion to a cause that would do Maureen Dowd proud. The ideal heroine for a suspicious age, girl-positive Nancy defies powerful adult male criminal forces and fights on the side of victimized women such as Dehlia.

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As befits such a spunky role model, Nancy comes accessorized with a back-burner love interest, the devoted, equally clean-cut Ned (Max Thierot). But unlike most chick flicks for adult women that favor romance over “career,” in Nancy and Ned’s mutually respectful relationship, this hardy boy understands love will always take a back seat.

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“You’re only happy when there’s trouble,” sighs Ned.

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Though very different films with unique agendas, Nancy Drew and the art-house shocker Crazy Love do share an affinity for old-school girls with very different approaches to life and love.

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Also a good girl from another era, Linda Riss might have been a victim in a Nancy Drew mystery – a pretty girl targeted by a rotten villain.

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The bastard in this true-crime romance is married playboy and ambulance-chasing Bronx lawyer Burt Pugach, who began a desperate romantic pursuit of Linda in 1957. And though enticed by Pugach’s flashy style and questionably attained prosperity, Linda exhibited the defining features of her generation’s value system: She was essentially a good girl who refused to give it up until she got her wedding ring.

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The charismatic, feisty Linda is interviewed in the present day remembering, “Burt wanted to have sex with me, and my attitude was, ‘No way José. When I get married, that’s when I go to bed with you and not before then.’”

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But Burt couldn’t separate from his wife, and Linda’s eventual romance with a younger, more suitable beau inflamed Burt. In the kind of sex-and-scandal story that burns up the New York tabloids, the vengeful, jilted creep paid a thug to throw acid in Linda’s face, partially blinding and permanently disfiguring the girl.

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But as Crazy Love attests, the sickest twist came later. Burt and Linda began a correspondence from Burt’s jail cell. Eventually there was a reconciliation. And finally, marriage.

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The conclusion of co-directors Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens’ creepy documentary is the ultimate perversion of a “happy” ending. After one friend virtually condemns her to a life of loneliness as an unmarried 35-year-old perpetually hiding her scars behind dark glasses, Linda decides the love of a lunatic is better than no love at all.

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While the romance-cagey Nancy closes out Nancy Drew with a chaste kiss for Ned, Crazy Love ends with the sickening old-school vision of a woman so intent on not being alone, she would shack up with the man who maimed her.

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Crazy Love proposes Linda and Burt as a kind of implausible joke: two crazies who were probably made for each other. But it’s a sick joke, and an unpleasant one, and you feel for the two monsters created out of a shared legacy of loneliness, misplaced values, parental abandonment and abuse.

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If Nancy Drew is an old-fashioned girl re-energized for contemporary kids as a champion of justice and girl power, then Linda is like a spook from a darker, uglier slice of the past, when women were nothing without a man.