Der Brieföffner

Installment in the popular Stuart Webbs detective series.

Directed by Lupu Pick, who died far too young, it was billed as a melodrama about a ring of counterfeiters on its first screening in New York City. Pick plays with the already well-established conventions of the detective genre for maximum effect and humor.

In Russia shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Princess Vorontsov (Ellen Richter) is in love with a high-ranking officer of the tsarist army. When he is murdered, she craves revenge. The leading suspect is a lawyer with ties to nihilist revolutionaries. On behalf of the secret police, she travels to Switzerland in order to gain his trust and facilitate his arrest. Too late she realizes that she has been toyed with all along. Her fiancé was not the man she thought she was.

A power plant worker (Garrison) eagerly joins a strike for higher wages. When his young daughter falls severely ill and needs emergency surgery, the strike he helped organize shuts down the city's power grid. The operating room plunges into darkness during the critical procedure. Overcome by the tragedy, the worker is convinced by his wife (Porten) to abandon the strike.

A production company holds a public competition for film ideas. The winning letter tells of a young woman's lost love in the 1840's. It is, in fact, the true story of a now elderly woman's life.

Major industrialist Rimay fights a ruthless economic rivalry with competitor de Jong. The villainous Rimay tries to steal de Jong's Moroccan mines by inciting local Rif kabyles to rebel. Ellen Richter stars as Zoraja, navigating the high-stakes corporate and international conflict.

In Cairo, a quest for a coveted antiquity draws the heroine into a clandestine cult devoted to Osiris. What begins as intrigue turns perilous—abductions, conspiracies, and night-time chases through temples and tombs—until she fights to escape the sect’s grip.

The story moves deeper into North Africa and Europe, following dangerous escapades and confrontations. Plots thicken around the control of the mines and the shifting loyalties of the characters involved.