Gordon Harker gets out of prison from his latest turn, having heard about a fabulous piece of emerald jewelry that was stolen and is still around. He goes to the home of Lord Gerald Barry, hoping to find it. He is mistaken for an investigator, bribed by everyone in the house to cover up their indiscretions, and serves the cause of love, justice, and his own pocketbook in the process.
For a Julius Hagen production, it's rather lush, from a play by Edgar Wallace, with Betty Stockfield, Jane Carr, Geraldine Fitzgerald (in her third film appearance), and Sebastian Shaw, young and slim enough to play the juvenile -- I'm used to him in the late 1950s, where 'portly' is the kindest way to describe him. Harker has a lot of fun in the lead in a variation of registers, wandering about, accepting large sums of money, biffing a couple of lags who also want the loot, and falling into luck with barely concealed astonishment. Perhaps it had been pre-sold to Universal under the Kinematograph Act, and Hagen decided to spend the money to begin his upgrading of product. In any case, it's the best print of any talkie directed by Henry Edwards I've seen, and definitely worth your time.
