Billie Dove is in town to visit her brother, Doctor Nicholas Soussanin. Meanwhile, Archduke Clive Brook shows up with his current amour, Jane Winton, with whom he is getting bored. He orders her to return to the capital, she takes poison and is rushed to the doctor, soon followed by Brook, who makes some cynical remarks to Miss Dove. She replies with contempt. After Miss Winton is disposed of, he decides he wants Miss Dove. In the rather old-fashioned manner of these things, he offers her insults, gets her brother away on a pretext, and invades her bedroom. When Soussanin returns, Brook is showing signs of a feeble conscience, and Miss Dove realizes she loves him.
Huh? Anyway, an altercation ensues, Brook is injured, and it's Soussanin and Miss Dove who are in trouble, because Daddy Archduke Marc McDermott disapproves of, well, everything.
At first I thought there were some gaps in this movie, but the IMDb shows it at 65 minutes, and that's how long the copy I saw took. Brook spends the entire movie alternating a sneer with a grim look. I suspect he was freshly back from working with Demille and Paramount didn't have anything to put him in. Or perhaps they wished to punish him. Sound was on the horizon, and the major studios would soon be trying to cut the wages of their expensive stars. With his stage training, they couldn't claim he didn't have a suitable voice. Director Alexander Korda was in Hollywood, learning how to direct movies that would appeal to more than his fellow Hungarians, so they gave him a story by Lajos Biros, filtered it through screenwriter Bess Meredyth, and got ready for sound.
