When Lightning Strikes

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.

Young farmer David Ross stands to inherit his uncle's fortune provided he contacts his missing cousin. When the cousin dies, the cousin's brother persuades a radio personality Maida Vaughn to assume the heiress's identity. She falls for the farmer, confesses the deception, and they marry.

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.

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.

The story of Ethel Armstrong and her father Henry looking forward to her marriage to the ambitious attorney Bruce Steele. Bruce is elected district attorney and goes after a group of food profiteers. Ethel breaks the engagement when her father falls under suspicion as one of the food hoarders.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Rufus Asher suspects that Barbara Wier is plotting with his sister's husband, Edmund Hyde, he abducts Barbara and takes her to a lonely mountain retreat. Mistaking Rufus for a vagabond, Barbara shoots him, then nurses him back to health, explaining that she and Edmund were trying to stop an elopement of Edmund's wife with another man, Hugh Langley.

Small-town girl Mary Barry wins a beauty contest and goes to New York to meet D. V. Cortelyou, the magazine's publisher. Greatly taken by young girl, Cortelyou arranges for her to live with Dolly Griffith, a woman of questionable reputation who often aids him in his wicked schemes of blackmail and seduction. During a party seemingly in Mary's honor, Cortelyou obtains some apparently compromising evidence with which to blackmail Mrs. Young, the wife of a wealthy broker; Cortelyou then makes rough advances toward Mary, and one of his assistants, Jack McGuire, gives him a good beating.

Harvey Baremore is upset with any perceived extravagance from his demure wife Druid, while he is secretly stealing from his boss John Kimball to ply his mistress Doris with gifts. Yet when he fears that he may be discovered he counts on his wife to entreat his boss for leniency on his behalf. Kimball agrees to overlook Harvey's theft in exchange for Druid's company, but despite this strange arrangement Kimball's intentions may in fact be true.

A young ranch foreman, Bud Drake aka The Kid, is wrongfully arrested for the theft of six-thousand dollars from ranch-owner "Hardshell" Beckett. He escapes and with the aid of Beckett's adopted daughter, Alice, sets out to clear his name.

World War I, October 1918. The more than 500 men of the 77th Infantry Division of the United States Army, who have been recruited in New York City and trained in Yaphank, are sent to France, to help break down the German defenses located in the Argonne forest…

Mad scientist works on a death ray in his mountain hideaway.