Assassin of Youth

After an aged woman, Elizabeth Barrie, is killed in an automobile accident by a car driven by a youth under the influence of marijuana and kissing a girl, a newspaper editor learns that the woman's will includes a moral clause that her granddaughter Joan will receive her money only if she proves worthy in her standards of morality when she reaches the age of maturity. The editor sends cub reporter Art Brighton to the town where Joan lives to mix with the youth there. Linda Clayton, Joan's cousin who is secretly married to Jack Howard, plots to have Jack compromise Joan so that Linda will get the inheritance. Jack invites Joan to an evening "weenie bake," with other youths, and while he flirts with her, she slips and falls into a lake. As her clothes dry by a campfire, Linda puts her dress close to the fire and it burns up. Joan is wearing only a coat over her underwear when Linda drives her car and hits a sign on the lawn of town gossip Henrietta Frisbie. The next day, Frisbie's tale of Joan's "nudity" fails to influence Judge George Herbert, who will decide the outcome of the Barrie will. Art, who has gotten a job as a sodajerk at a fountain run by Henry "Pop" Brady, reports the gossip that Joan took off her clothes and danced the hula, but his editor is unimpressed. After screening for Art a film entitled The Marijuana Menace , the editor shows Art pictures of marijuana peddlers and sends him back to investigate the part the drug plays in the lives of the young people. After Linda receives drugs hidden in a flashlight at an out-of-the-way service station, she distributes marijuana to her eager girl friends at a party and gives Joan's younger sister Marjorie some pills. The party suddenly becomes raucous, and Jack gets Joan intoxicated. When Joan, who wants to go home, asks Art, whom she earlier rebuffed, to find Marjorie, he locates her about to go to bed with a man and brings her back to the party. Joan passes out and returns home very late. The next day, after Frisbie spreads the gossip that Joan spent the night with Jack, Marjorie, jealous of her sister, says that she too is going in for "free love." Hurt by the rumors, Joan cries to her understanding mother, who says that she doesn't care about the money. At the fountain, when Art sees Jack flirt with Joan, he throws Jack out and takes Joan for a drive. After running out of gas, they walk to the service station and see Linda with two men, one of whom Art recognizes from the photographs his editor showed him. Art goes to a party at Linda's and purchases marijuana from her. Mrs. Barrie and Joan go to look for Marjorie at Linda's and find her about to stab a girl for kissing a boy she likes. After a doctor diagnoses Marjorie as being on the verge of insanity and says he suspects she has been using marijuana, Art reveals that he is a reporter and enlists Joan's help to get evidence against Linda. She calls Jack and, saying that she now wants to live up to her "bad reputation," makes a date. Jack throws a party in honor of her decision, and during it, Linda, suspicious of Jack's interest in Joan, puts pills into a piece of cake she serves to Joan, who has already smoked some of Jack's marijuana. Jack proposes marriage and takes Joan to a hotel, supposedly to straighten up first, and they are followed first by Linda and then by Art. Art overhears the two drug peddlers in one of the hotel rooms and after a struggle, disarms them. The police, whom Linda called, arrest Jack and Joan on a morals charge. At the trial, Joan refuses to implicate Linda until Art arrives. Pop Brady stalls, revealing that Judge Herbert once spent the night in a barn with Henrietta Frisbie, and Art finally enters with the peddlers and accuses Linda of selling drugs. Later, Frisbie announces from her scooter the news that Joan and Art are going to be married.