Marcia Harris

Young scout Breck Coleman leads a wagon train along the dangerous trail to Oregon as he tries to get the affection of the beautiful pioneer Ruth Cameron and plans his revenge on the harsh scoundrels who murdered a friend of his in the past.

Charm and Valor fall in love and are married. Jealousy, however, is angry at their happiness and decides to ruin their marriage, so she arranges for Charm to find an old photograph of her husband's former sweetheart Forgotten. Valor is also led to mistrust Charm, and the two return to their respective parents: his, Finance and Display, and hers, Commerce and Pride. While Charm spends her days with Sorrow, Treachery endeavors to ruin Valor by luring him to a disreputable roadhouse, and when Valor's father tries to bring him home, the young man strikes his father with a bottle. The two sets of parents are in the midst of a financial battle when Charm gives birth to a child, Happiness. The child reunites the couple, and Madame Jealousy, along with her servants Mischief, Treachery and Rumor, finally are banished.

Orphan Pip discovers through lawyer Mr. Jaggers that a mysterious benefactor wishes to ensure that he becomes a gentleman. Reunited with his childhood patron, Miss Havisham, and his first love, the beautiful but emotionally cold Estella, he discovers that the elderly spinster has gone mad from having been left at the altar as a young woman, and has made her charge into a warped, unfeeling heartbreaker.

When Tourneur adapted the allegorical plays The Blue Bird by Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck and Prunella by British playwrights Harley Granville Barker and Lawrence Housman in 1918, they had been successfully staged for many years, opening in Moscow and on Broadway and everywhere. Today, the saccharine charm of these anti-modern fairy tales doesn’t work any more. But undistracted by the meaning or action of the film, we can enjoy the surface of Prunella all the better, the dazzling sets and costumes, silhouettes and painted backdrops created by the great art director Ben Carré in a fashionable Art Déco Neo-Rococo style.

Myrtle Meers breaks her engagement with Larry Fields when he proves to be a coward. Fields goes to work in his father's Pennsylvania coal mines to find his manhood. There he thwarts a plan to control the mines, rescues June Waugh, the girl he loves, and wins self-respect.

Oscar, a tough guard at Newberry Prison, gets into an argument with Jerry, a smallish barber. He causes Jerry to be arrested as a fugitive, and gets him sent to Newberry. It's not long before both men fall in love with Mary, the daughter of the warden. Oscar gets Jerry put on the prison football team, where he is the smallest guy there, figuring that he will look like a fool in front of Mary and then she will pick Oscar. However, things don't turn out quite the way Oscar planned.

Geoffrey Tempest is desperately in love with aspiring writer Mavis Claire, a tenant of his boardinghouse. Unable to marry her due to his poverty, in his anger, he curses God for abandoning him. Soon, Geoffrey meets Prince Lucio de Rimanez, a wealthy, urbane gentleman who informs Geoffrey that he's inherited a fortune, but that he must place himself in the Prince's hands in order to enjoy the fruits of his inheritance. What Geoffrey doesn't know is that Prince Lucio is actually Satan.

Kathleen, the daughter of a poor tenant farmer, dreams of her wedding with her beloved Terrence. The dream is interrupted when the Squire of the estate takes an interest in Kathleen and forces her father to allow him to marry her to forgive the father's debt.