This melodrama directed by Albert Parker stars Gloria Swanson, aged 19, when her crystal eyes were at their most bewitching. The film covers several years, and she ages well. The story begins with her unable to pay the rent for the tenement apartment which she shares with her invalid sister, who cannot even get out of bed. Gloria is a struggling young painter who cannot sell her paintings, and she is down to her last penny. A horrible lecherous rent collector comes to the door and demands money but makes it clear that he will settle instead for payment 'in natura', as they say in Italian slang. He starts to pull her clothes off but she fights him off. His vanity is such that he cannot accept the rebuff and he vows vengeance. Upon leaving the building, he realizes that he does not have his wallet containing all the rent payments. In the struggle to rape Gloria, he had dropped it on the floor. Just as she notices it and picks it up, her door flies open and there is the rent collector with a policeman, and she is accused of theft and arrested. There are horrible scenes in the court where her pleas of innocence are disregarded, and she is sentenced to three months in prison. There is then a great discontinuity in the film because we then see Gloria getting out of prison, and she says her sister has died. It is as if a section of the film were chopped out. Gloria joins the Salvation Army and then she meets a good rich man and they get married and have a child. Another discontinuity in the film occurs when we jump forward very abruptly by five years. It is hard to resist the assumption that at least 20 minutes must have been cut from this film, which now runs 60 minutes. Now the horrible rent collector reappears and tries to blackmail Gloria, telling her she is now on shifting sands (hence the film's title) because if he tells her husband and her hostile mother-in-law that she went to jail for theft she will lose everything. But the story is more complicated than that, because the rent collector has become a German secret agent and what he wants is not money but secret government papers locked in the safe to which only Gloria and her husband know the combination. Will she or won't she? Does she or doesn't she? Will the evil rent collector finally meet with justice? Will Gloria's husband cast her out? I ain't sayin'.
