When Wade Cameron, chairman of the Better Plays Society, stops the production of actress Gilda Lamont's first stage success, she attempts to revenge herself by affecting another personality and earning his confidence. He assigns her a role in an improvised production of a new play as an unknown...
In this farce, Mavis Jerome, is an actress who has just broken up with her fiancé, Homer Owen. She goes to her brother-in-law's island retreat, but her stay is interrupted by one of his pals, John Jordan. Her rest is further disturbed when Owen shows up on her doorstep during a storm.
An oil tanker burns at sea, and Molla Hansen, the captain's daughter, is the only survivor. Her rescuer, lighthouse-keeper Silas Martin, is fatally burned, and begs Molla to look after his daughter, Pearl. Meanwhile, Captain Rodney O'Malley, Molla's grief-stricken fiancé, departs on a long cruise....
Genteel southern horse-breeder Col. Richard Fairfax is framed on the charge of embezzlement by Martyn Selsby, his business partner, and sentenced to jail.
Opera singer Julia Montfort (Irene Rich) returns to the stage when her husband, Verdugo Montford (Josef Swickard) loses his job...and then gives him work secretly paid for by herself. When a temperamental artist Babette Hermann (Pauline Garon) reveals the secret, Verdugo becomes disillusioned....
Chasing a gambler that stole money, Tom Larkin gets his horse shot out from under him. Meeting an outlaw with a horse, after a fight Tom rides away on that horse. Arriving in town he is mistaken for the outlaw and offered a job of killing a man. But the man is the father of the girl that Tom's...
Captain Black and his motley crew of pirates are shipwrecked on a South Sea island, where they hold several shanghaied sailors captive. Black observes the ship commanded by Hurricane Martin approaching and conspires to get his men aboard the vessel and seize the cargo.
A thug robs a young engaged couple of their last few dollars. When the thug's gang boss hears of the robbery, he gives them back their money and takes them under his wing. The thug, resentful of the couple, plans to organize a mutiny against the gang's boss, but when he is killed in a botched...
Palestine, under the rule of Rome. Salome, daughter of Herodias and both niece and stepdaughter of King Herod, becomes infatuated with the prophet John the Baptist, who publicly denounces the depravity of the royal family and proclaims the arrival of a new messiah. (Film presumed lost.)
Dance-hall queen Kate Carewe is the toast of the gold-mining camp of Huxley's Gulch. One day a minister, Ralph Bowen, arrives to "clean up" the town. He is scorned by the miners, gamblers and "loose women" of the place, especially Kate, who resents that Bowen calls her a "scarlet woman".
High Stakes is a 1931 American Pre-Code comedy drama produced and released by RKO Pictures. The picture was directed by Lowell Sherman who also stars and marks the last starring screen appearance of silent screen diva Mae Murray. It is based on a 1924 Broadway play that starred Sherman playing the...
The cabaret act of husband-and-wife dancing team Peggy and Joe Blondin is broken up when Joe becomes consumptive and is ordered West to recuperate. Peggy remains in New York to maintain the couple's income but gradually becomes desperate when letters sent her by her husband request more and more...
As described in a film magazine, when Maria Valverda (Bara) refuses the attentions of Diablo Ramirez (Nye), he starts an insurrection among the native Filipinos. Maria's father Don Ramon is killed and Maria is held hostage. She gets word to Capt. Paul Winter (Roscoe) of the American troops in...
Allayne Norman's husband Bruce is a gambler and drunkard who kills her artist cousin in an argument. Bruce flees the studio with Allayne and their son, and places his identifying documents in the pockets of an amnesiac man. To avoid the consequences of his actions, Allayne identifies the man as her...
Gerrit Ammidon, despairing of any chance to marry his love, Nettie Vollar, because of a bitter feud between his father and her grandfather, sails to China to "get away from it all". While in Shanghai he rescues a beautiful young woman being attacked by a gang of street toughs. She turns out to be...
A World War I veteran takes on the Ku Klux Klan when he loses his wife to a womanizing Klansman. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with University of Nevada, Las Vegas Foundation.