La confidente

Helen Blake is a rich party hearty kind of girl who gets involved with a gigolo, and even marries him on a whim when she and her gang are making the party rounds and wind up in Pennsylvania. She goes home and finds out her father has had an attack of some sort, and he dies shortly afterwards. Later she finds out her dad died broke. He had lost his money in the stock market crash and had been subsisting off of loans from a family friend, Mr. Merritt (Berton Churchill). After paying all of the bills there will be nothing left. Her gigolo husband deserts her, claiming that she married him just for the money she thought he had, and Helen goes to work as a social secretary for Mr. Merritt's family. She is treated pretty well, but the daughter in the family, Sylvia, lost the gigolo to Helen, and she does the wicked stepsister routine towards Helen as much as she can get away with it.

How does this seguey into a suspenseful thriller? The gigolo actually goes and gets a job as a real gigolo at a nightclub, lifting older ladies' jewelry and giving it to his gangster boss from which he receives a cut. But the urge to cheat the gangster is irresistible to the gigolo, the urge to cheat on her British fiance (Herbert Marshall) with the gigolo is irresistible to Sylvia, and the British fiance, who is marrying Sylvia out of gratitude to her dad for a family favor, finds Helen irresistible. Complications ensue.

Mary Boland keeps things light as Mrs. Merritt who is kind to Helen and has some great one liners as she always plays the comic high society dame with flair. Note Millard Mitchell, who is uncredited, in a small role playing a cop twenty years before he is the rather clueless studio head in "Singin in the Rain".