This part-talkie (17 minutes of dialogue in its 83-minute running time) tells the tale of Christina, the daughter of Dutch toymaker Niklaas. Much to her dad's dismay, Christina falls in love with sideshow huckster Jan. Likewise disapproving of the romance is Jan's jealous employer Mme. Bosman, who frames the young man on an embezzlement charge.
What is more miserable than love-blighted life? For the heart that truly loves can never forget. Such is the sad fate of the hero of this Biograph story.
Wealthy Anne Wilmot vacationing along with her aunt Katherine at her fiancé Leon Morse's (Hull) Arizona mountain lodge discovers his plot to destroy a nearby hydroelectric engineering project in order to obtain the land for his railway. She thwarts the sabotage but find herself in a life and death struggle.
Besse Belwin works as a stenographer for district attorney John Mobley. It doesn't take long for Mobley to fall in love with his cute little employee and he proposes. Besse doesn't reveal that her father has a criminal past which he has since renounced.
After locksmith Joe Sands is acquitted of charges he cooperated in a burglary, master criminal Steve Benson, who poses as a philanthropist, asks him to join his gang. Joe refuses, but because his crippled brother needs an operation, he robs a safe. Joe is caught, but Sadie, a member of Benson's gang, saves him. Because Joe again refuses Benson's offer, Benson turns Joe over to the police. Joe is saved from prosecution by the man whose safe he robbed, the physician who operated on his brother. Finally, Joe, Sadie and the brother start life over in the country.
An American millionaire visiting London falls in love with a young aristocrat and elopes with her, pursued by a rival suitor.
When Arthur Gilpin, a black night watchman, finds young Myrtle Gunsaulus mysteriously murdered in the basement of a factory, he is charged with the crime. The film is now believed to be lost.
Jan Bokak is a self-educated steelworker who finds himself in the middle of a romantic triangle. Two different girls -- wealthy socialite Claire Pitt and blue-collar worker Mary Berwick -- simultaneously fall for Bokak. It later develops that Claire and Mary are actually sisters, the first of a series of surprising plot twists leading to Bokak being accused of a murder he didn't commit.
Pierre, the maitre d' at the swanky Ritz Hotel in Paris, discovers that he has a son from his former marriage, which was broken up by his wealthy wife's upper-class relatives. His son, now a young man and unaware that Pierre is is father, is in danger of becoming the victim of blackmailer Mae Morin. Pierre sets out to save him from the notorious Mae.
A man drowns himself in lake. As he is dying, he recalls the crucial moments of his life and the incidents that led to his final, fatal decision.
Doris Poole, whose parents were theatrical people, was orphaned as a child, and four members of the troupe adopted and raised her. When grown, she has become the leading lady in a San Francisco stock-company. She meets and falls in love with Ted, the millionaire son of a rich widow, but she thinks he is only a tax-cab driver. His mother objects to the romance and looks into Doris' past. She learns that her father had murdered, in a fit of jealousy, her mother, and tells Doris what she has found out. The four actors who had raised her had never told her how she happened to become an orphan. They persuade Ted's mother to send him on a voyage to the Orient in order to get him away from Doris. But they neglected to tell the mother they had also booked passage for Doris on the same ship.
A young woman with a shady past goes to the tropics, where she winds up marrying a vicious and brutal pearl trader, then falls in love with another man.
Myrtle Downing, an African-American woman, is coerced into marrying a corrupt would-be politician named Gyp Lassiter, even though she is really in love with Stephen Cameron, a young lawyer. When she discovers that her husband has conspired to support segregationist policies in exchange for support by white political power brokers, she objects to his crooked dealings and gets herself imprisoned in a secret dungeon where her husband had murdered his previous wives. Presumed to be a lost film.
Deceit (sometimes referred to as The Deceit) is a 1923 American silent black-and-white film. It is a conventional melodrama directed by Oscar Micheaux. Like many of Micheaux's films, Deceit casts clerics in a negative light. Although the film was shot in 1921, it was not released until 1923. It is not known whether the film currently survives, which suggests that it is a lost film. The 1922 film The Hypocrite was shown within Deceit as a film within a film.
A young black Harvard graduate fights against a variety of obstacles, including racist opposition, in order to build a school for black children. Considered a lost film.
The wife of sculptor Roger Heath is killed by a maniac because of Roger's madly jealous admirer Olivia Larkin. To care for his home and son Peter, Roger hires Irish immigrant Nora O'Hallahan as a nursemaid whom he realizes is possessed by the soul of his departed wife.
Danny O'Rourke is the son of a police officer who was killed in the line of duty. Eager to join the police force, Danny fails his exams. The failure causes him to neglect his sweetheart Maggie, whose father is a police lieutenant. His attentions turn instead towards society girl Miriam Welton. When Danny’s sister, Shannon, is arrested for shoplifting, Danny turns to boxing to save her. He works his way towards the championship but discovers the final bought has been rigged. Danny fights anyhow and he is beaten, but it is discovered that a mistake had been made on his exams and he actually was eligible to join the police force after all. Considered a lost film.
An heiress takes a road trip in a green van. Unbeknownst to her, she has four pursuers.
Society miss Sally Raeburn is left penniless and is helped out by an older woman. The woman makes it clear that to repay her, Sally must marry wealth, so when the very well-heeled Lester comes to her village, Sally goes after him. Lester has been traveling incognito in the hopes that no one will discover him, so when Sally wins him she feels guilty and confesses that she knew who he was all along.
Viola Baxter is deceived into a hasty marriage with her guardian, Marshall Welch, who is after her money and has framed her fiancé, Dick Fletcher, for theft. She discovers and exposes her husband's perfidy. Humiliated, Welch decides to take his wife's life along with his own, but she is saved by her Great Dane.