Bonita Granville became a child star when she played a brat in These Three. This gives her a star "brat" role.
She is a rich kid whose parents basically ignore her. For the first 20 minutes or so she's quite sympathetic - I mean a brat, but we understand why. Her parents are bad, the butler is snobby. She goes and makes friends with a black boy (called Pinky) and is stunned how much the black boy's mother cares about her life. She invites Pink to the house and wants to be his friend; the butler kicks out the kid calling him a vagabond but it's clear it's basic racism.
Then she does some really bad things - sets fire to her room when she's locked up,grabs a steering wheel when the family butler is driving and causes the car to hit another car and kills the other driver, then says the butler was drinking! The butler goes to prison for a year.
She eventually confesses to a creepy man, her father's secretary who is meant to be nice. She gets sent to reform shool, run by Dolores Costello who eventually turns her around by getting her to teach the younger girls... which is quite moving.
A decent melodrama - it packs a hell of a lot in at 62 minutes. Arthur Lubin's handling is strong the cast includes Donald Crisp as dad. It's remarkable how crap the parents are - they only get her to move home a t the end by the mother falling sick. It's very progressive in its treatment of blacks but I guess the little kids didn't have to embrace the colour bar. We never know what happened to the butler (apart from him not going to prison).
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