Louis Dean

Michael Cardigan is an American patriot in the months before the American Revolution. He fights to broker a peace deal between settlers and the Cayuga tribe and almost loses his life in the process. Despite the fact that he loves Silver Heels, the ward of the British governor, Michael joins with the famed Minute Men to plot revolution and, he hopes, a free American nation.

Eve Mason, a white-passing black woman, moves to a remote cottage she inherited from her late father. She makes the acquaintance of her neighbor, a dashing black settler named Hugh Van Allen, and quickly falls for him. Trouble brews as the local cadre of racist hucksters want the valuable land Van Allen lives on, and will do anything to take it from him.

After her father and two brothers are killed, Cynthia and her mother go to New York, where Cynthia gets a job in his office working for a wealthy stockbroker who's attracted to her.

Eugene Solari is fanatically jealous of his beautiful wife Enid. While on a mission for her father, she visits Major Trevor. Her husband finds out and, enraged, rushes to Trevor's house. Enid tries to beat him there to warn Trevor, but is too late--when she gets there Eugene shoots her and then kills himself, but not before he names Trevor as his killer. Trevor is arrested for his murder.

This film is a very loose film adaptation of the 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo and presumed lost: The wealthy girl Esmeralda is kidnapped by gypsies at birth and becomes, as one might assume, the darling of Paris. She is loved by the bell ringer and former hunchback Quasimodo, Frollo, the wicked surgeon who cares him, and an equally wicked Captain Phoebus.

This epic traces, from the Beginning, the lineage of the race of peace-loving people. Mankind at its best is highlighted as greatness of character across the centuries is displayed: Noah heeding God's command, Moses leading the Israelities, Jesus Christ dying to save humanity and promote His message of peace. Moving into our modern epoch: Columbus's discovery of America, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation; A race of free humans committed to the proliferation of peace and freedom. What becomes of this race when autocratic powers threaten democracy in the time of the first World War?

Theda Bara's vamping is at its most evil here. She plays the Russian Princess Petrovitch, who loves only her pearls. Her husband, the Prince (E.F. Roseman), sells state secrets to a spy to pay her exorbitant bills, and her response is to report him to the secret police. Then she runs off to Monte Carlo with her lover, Count Zerstoff (Emil deVarney), but she poisons him after he racks up a load of gambling losses.

Desperate for a job, New York showgirl Eva Lee accepts an offer from Cameron Camden and Eban Burnham to go to South America to dance exotic.