first time in front of the cameras, as the studio's suspense drama, Cry Wolf, went into national release on August 19, 1947, although it was seen and reviewed in New York one month earlier. Billed third after top-tier stars Errol Flynn and Barbara Stanwyck she received mostly good notices, while the film itself encountered critical resistance, with The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther complaining that "[t]he final explanation of the mystery is ridiculous and banal." Her second film at the studio, Possessed, was released three weeks before Cry Wolf, on July 26, and was, again, reviewed in New York earlier, on May 30. This time, she was in fourth place, behind top-tier stars Joan Crawford and Van Heflin and third-billed Raymond Massey. A much more vulnerable persona than the poised, imperturbable one she played in Cry Wolf, she had a number of heavy dramatic confrontations with the overwrought character played by Joan Crawford (who received an Oscar nomination for the role) and became a lifelong friend of the eighteen-years-older star, and spoke at her memorial service in May 1977, five weeks before her own death. Seeing the young actor for the first time in the latter film, Bosley Crowther described her as "a newcomer who burns brightly ... as Miss Crawford's sensitive step-daughter". In her third film, Warners allowed its new contract player to rise to the level of a co-star. Embraceable You, released in July 1948, had her second-billed to Dane Clark, who played a goodhearted, although criminally inclined, tough guy who falls in love with the victim of the hit-and-run car accident for which he was responsible. There was no happy ending for the two doomed protagonists, and the film, structured as a second feature, was little-noticed and went unreviewed in The New York Times. After one more film, The Younger Brothers, a color Western not released until May 1949, in which she was, again, in fourth place, following Wayne Morris, Janis Paige and Bruce Bennett, Brooks asked for, and received, a release from her studio contract in July 1948, after two years and four films. Now a freelancer, she had a strong fourth-billed (following Fredric March, Edmond O'Brien and Florence Eldridge) dramatic role in Universal Pictures' An Act of Murder, playing the daughter of March and Eldridge, who were married in real life, and the anguish that the husband, a judge, endures when he contemplates ending