A Common Level

Swashbuckling serial starring Eddie Polo. Chapter titles: 1. Shanghaied 2. The Pirate's Slave 3. Hidden Treasure 4. The Lost Fortune 5. The Missing Plans 6. Trapped 7. The Secret Passage 8. Outwitted 9. The Third Degree 10. Double-Crossed 11. [unknown] 12. A Fight for a Fortune 13. [unknown] 14. A Fight in Mid-Air 15. Victory and Happiness.

Disowned by her family for marrying beneath her class, Alice Larkin lives in a modest home with her husband, John, and their children. Meanwhile, wealthy Ethel Lewis is separated from her husband, Robert, because she refuses to have children. On Ethel's behalf, a lawyer offers Alice $50,000 in exchange for the adoption of her youngest child, Louise. After Alice reluctantly accepts, Ethel presents the child to Robert as their own. Alice visits the Lewis home frequently, rekindling Robert's long-dormant romantic feelings for her. John is consumed with jealousy and attempts to shoot Robert, but accidentally hits Louise. Alice then awakens to find that it was a horrible dream. She refuses the lawyer's offer just as her Aunt Martha enters with apologies and Christmas presents.

To gain access to a moonshiner, a detective marries the moonshiner's sister. He abandons her after the arrest is made but his conscience haunts him.

Aaron Abrams' daughter Rachel died broken-hearted after her marriage was cruelly annulled by her father-in-law Roger Mortimer, and so years later, his oath of revenge remembered, Abrams has plans to destroy Mortimer's son Russel, unaware and uncaring how the happiness of the people he loves most has became intertwined with the Mortimer family.

Traveling evangelist Ephram Judson (Albert Tavernier) is met with some formidable opposition in the person of avowed atheist Hugh Lee (Frank Mills). It seems that Lee disavowed the existence of God when his beloved sister was stricken with blindness. Judson's daughter Ruth (Jane Grey) does her best to convert Lee, but it's a losing battle. Even worse, a series of bizarre coincidences leads the villagers to conclude (wrongly) that Lee has tried to "have his way" with the virginal Ruth. On the verge of being lynched by the angry townsfolk, Lee is saved by a timely bolt of lightning -- whereupon he embraces that Old Time Religion in a real hurry. Cast as Ruth's ne'er-do-well brother Tom is diminutive Percy Helton, best known to latter-day film buffs for his raspy-voiced character roles in such talkies as The Robe, Kiss Me Deadly and The Music Man.

1929 American Western film directed by Burton L. King.

Typhus specialist Dr. David West has fought long and hard for the construction of the new municipal waterworks. Harrison Blake, the town's leading lawyer and banker, conspires to have the waterworks put into private hands and frames David for accepting a bribe. As none of the town's lawyers will take the case, Katherine, David's daughter and a recent law school graduate, accepts her first client in her father. However, the circumstantial evidence is too great and David is convicted. Harrison bribes a worker to sabotage the waterworks, causing a public clamor for their takeover by private interests. Katherine, with the aid of newspaper editor Arnold Bruce, uncovers the conspiracy after the outbreak of a typhus epidemic. David is freed, and Katherine weds Arnold.

Badger, a clerk at a Wall Street brokerage, discovers that his boss Gideon Bloodgood has swindled an investor, Fairweather, out of his money. Fairweather dies of a heart attack after an argument with Bloodgood, and Badger uses this knowledge to blackmail him. By a strange coincidence, Bloodgood's daughter Lucy runs over Fairweather's son, Paul, and cripples him.

Raised in the lap of luxury, Norma Russell is ill-prepared for her father's financial reverses. In exchange for a $25,000 loan, Norma's dad promises her hand in marriage to bank president Howard Dundore.

Pierre Felix, a couturier, makes a $25,000 bet with Ralph Courtland that he can take a girl from the streets, dress her appropriately, and within three months have her accepted into society.

Larry Moore is a young amateur actor and lives at the same boarding house with Adele Lawrence, a rising young star, who has just secured the leading part in a play called "The Love Behind the Throne." Moore has been unsuccessful in his attempts to get a place and Adele sympathizes with him deeply.

Wealthy Lucy Winter falls in love itinerant gardener George Turner much to her father's chagrin. In flashback we find there is a deep seated reason for his truculence, one that caused great sorrow to all. In time things are resolved after much soul searching.

When widowed attorney Richard Tucker refuses to defend bootlegger Julius Molnar in court, the latter swears revenge. Tucker pays no heed to Molnar, concentrating instead on his impending marriage to his secretary Irene Rich. After his release from prison, the bootlegger begins his campaign of vengeance by leading Tucker's beloved daughter Janet Vale astray.

Leone Daingerfield, a ruthless old woman, tries to crush the romance between her heir, Edward Daingerfield, and her granddaughter, Judith, whose blood relationship she refuses to acknowledge.

Nancy Page is a frivolous socialite until her husband Richard becomes entangled in his employer David Davenport's shady business dealings.

A wealthy young socialite gets the gambling bug, and soon it goes from being just a fun pastime to an addiction, and she begins to lose more and more of her fortune.