Pierre Landis is insanely jealous of his beautiful young wife Joan, and his jealousy makes him take a branding iron to her to mark her as his property.
Arnold L'Hommedieu and his friends Archie Hartogensis and Hugo Waldemar go to New York to find work after being unfairly expelled from college. Arnold starts off as helpful and idealistic, but after being beaten down by life, he decides he is only after money and becomes an opium smuggler. His pals...
George Dryden, an atheist since he saw his mother struck and killed by lightning as a kid, becomes a prominent surgeon and marries a woman who soon dies of heart disease. Years later, on his daughter's wedding day, he discovers that his wife had a serious love affair with an artist. Infuriated, he...
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...
Sylvia, a model in the shop of a fashionable dressmaker, is introduced to the Hicks family, which recently has acquired a fortune through iron ore deposits discovered on their farm. Octavia Hicks sees in the cultured but unpretentious Sylvia a good match for her son Henry and invites the young...
Robert Strickland, the self-confessed murderer of Gerald Trask, refuses to defend himself on the witness stand. His attorney, however, cross-examines Strickland's wife.
Patriotism, love and treason in the United States during the First World War. Barker manages to give every scene the right climate through inventive use of color. From semi-documentary to cruel melodrama.
Andrew Maxwell is so intent on creating a universal language that he completely neglects his wife, Laurette, and daughter, Ruth. Laurette decides she wants to return to the stage and is encouraged by Charles Prescott, a former suitor. When Maxwell discovers Laurette and Prescott together, he...
On her wedding day, Norma Huntley wants to tell Edward Berkley, her husband-to-be, her secret -- that she mothered a child out of wedlock which subsequently died. Her mother forbids her to reveal this. Only moments after the ceremony, it is discovered that the child, now three, is actually alive....
When British gentleman Wilfred Denver weds the beautiful Nellie, he earns the undying hatred of Nellie's former sweetheart, Geoffrey Ware. After several years of cozy matrimonial contentment, Denver finds himself heavily in debt.
Badger, a clerk at a Wall Street brokerage, discovers that his boss Gideon Bloodgood has swindled an investor, Fairweather, out of his money. Fairweather dies of a heart attack after an argument with Bloodgood, and Badger uses this knowledge to blackmail him. By a strange coincidence, Bloodgood's...