The Stoker

When Natalie Moorhead walks out on their marriage and Monte Blue loses his shipping line, he decides on an ocean cruise...as a stoker on a ship bound for Nicaragua. There he winds up working on Dorothy Burgess' coffee plantation, and the sparks fly. Meanwhile Noah Beery is a bandit raiding the coffee warehouses, who tries to roughly woo the lovely senorita. When she marries Blue, Beery decides if he can't have her, he and his bandits will wipe out everyone at the plantation.

Chester Franklin directs this standard script with an immobile camera and a few interesting point-of-view scripts, but the cliches run riot, from Beery's Frito Bandito serape and hat, to the moment when he's eavesdropping and walks away at the wrong moment. Miss Burgess sports an accent -- she was often cast as a Latin American beauty -- and is very charming, despite her uninspiring dialogue. Keep a look out for Chris-Pin Martin as a Nicaraguan police chief.

Producer M.H. Hoffman and son, M.H. Junior, tried some ambitious projects in the early 1930s, hampered by Poverty Row budgets and down-on-their-heels talent like Blue and Franklin. This one looks like it was intended to keep the pot boiling.