A Bid for Fortune

This serial is a lot of fun to begin with and even promises at moments to come close in quality to the great Feuillade serials. The ingredients are much as usual - a suitable 'mcguffin" to keep the plot turning ("the Tibetan rod of knowledge" sounds a bit like a sexual innuendo one might use in the course of a seduction), a devious master criminal, lashings of fashionable orientalism, a modicum of horror, disguise, drugs, hallucination, magic, hypnosis, a kidnapping...but all rather neatly spun out with none of the constant violence and repetitious patterns of kidnap and escape that mar the US serials.

Valerie Graham as Phyllis Wetherell (who gets a special little vignette on the titlecard every time she intervenes) is a formidable heroine or a very English matter-of-fact kind (with a very English bosom and bum to go with it) who puts up with no nonsense from the villain or his cohorts of Chinese whom she disarms with a certain nonchalance.

It is quite a complex narrative which employs several devices - third-person narrative (to the extent this is possible in silents),flashback, a running clock on events ("at midnight precisely...."). There is an "imperial" scope, to-ing and fro-ing between Britain and Australia with a stop-off in Port Said (the principal route of the great liners) and somewhere that does not look as all like a South Sea island. Alas the Port Said scenes are also a fairly obvious fake-up....No Californian sunshine but some very attractive light fog in the British scenes.

Unfortunately the story becomes steadily more attenuated as it progresses. Our heroine hardly features, except passively after the early scenes and her boyfriend is no replacement. It all becomes just a little too polite and British and the deficiencies in the budget become a shade too apparent. Nonetheless well worth a watch.