The Woods family gathers at a cabin resort to hear the last will and testament of their wealthy patriarch George Woods ten years after his death. All vying for the much-anticipated Woods’ fortune, the players include his greedy sister and her grandson, an eccentric niece and two ambitious nephews, his mistress, and his missing daughter’s husband with their amnesiac granddaughter. Before the players can stake their claim to the family fortune, each must survive the family attorney’s investigation into the mysterious disappearance of Woods’ adopted daughter Mona. Why did Mona suddenly run away before the death of Woods? Will she show up to claim her fortune, or was her disappearance the result of a conspiracy? As the story unfolds, family members turn on each other and murder is the weapon of choice to reveal a dark secret.

Derrick De Marney finds himself in a 39 Steps situation when he is wrongly accused of murder. While a fugitive from the law, De Marney is helped by heroine Nova Pilbeam, who three years earlier had played the adolescent kidnap victim in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. The obligatory “fish out of water” scene, in which the principals are briefly slowed down by a banal everyday event, occurs during a child’s birthday party. The actual villain, whose identity is never in doubt (Hitchcock made thrillers, not mysteries) is played by George Curzon, who suffers from a twitching eye. Curzon’s revelation during an elaborate nightclub sequence is a Hitchcockian tour de force, the sort of virtuoso sequence taken for granted in these days of flexible cameras and computer enhancement, but which in 1937 took a great deal of time, patience and talent to pull off. Released in the US as The Girl Was Young, Young and Innocent was based on a novel by Josephine Tey.