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- Another of the "Fate and Irony" films from director-writer-producer-actor Hugo Haas but this one has less hair-shirt torment than most of his offerings, although his camera, as usual, lingers provocatively on the contours of the leading lady and, in this case, the leading lady is more than well-contoured. Mary Adams works in a tawdry waterfront restaurant where the owner not only maltreats her, he also cheated her father out of a fortune years ago. The owner acquires $25,000 in an illegal transaction, which Mary promptly steals, hides, confesses her crime and serves a short sentence. Freed, she goes to work in a restaurant owned by Dragomie Damitrod, and when he gets into trouble over a gambling debt, she offers to help him by telling him where the $25,000 is hidden, and will loan him what he needs. But circumstances indicate he has stolen all of the money, so she clouts him on the head, killing him. She then learns he didn't steal the money, digs it up and donates it to an orphanage, and surrenders to the police, where she learns that Damitrod is not dead. All is not lost as she seems to be heading for matrimony with fisherman Johnny, who has been hanging around romancing her at her various jobs between jail stints.
- As studio financing dwindled away for Hugo Haas, his last film as a writer-director-producer has certain autobiographical elements, a cast featuring several film veterans from the silent era, and a storyline containing a metaphoric commentary on Hollywood. When former European film director Agnus (Haas) witnesses bickering in a boarding house, he sets out to prove the innate goodness of people. Casting neighbors and the boarding house tenants in his new film, titled "The Chosen and the Condemned," he succeeds in creating peace, unity and harmony in the neighborhood. However, it's all a deception, since Agnus has no film in his camera. When a studio head learns of the project, he bankrolls a budget that enables Agnus to actually complete the film.
- Suspicious Raphael Vojnar, a Moravian village judge, makes his young wife Barbara witness the public humiliation of an unfaithful wife who is bound with ropes to a wooden half-cross. He tells Barbara that if he ever catches her with another man he will kill her. This is a certain indicator that the plot is about to thicken and the pot is about to boil. The next day, Barbara meets her old beau, Quirin, who is in town to help his old uncle Sima with the harvest. Vojnar recognizes Quirin as a man he had arrested years earlier. Vojnar, stirring the pot, makes an overnight trip out of town, and Quirin boldly breaks into Barbara's bedroom, where, to the surprise of none, he is warmly received. The surprise comes the next day when old uncle Sima is found stabbed to death. Quirin can not account for his whereabouts without compromising Barbara and,even worse, he has lost his pearl-handled knife and can't prove it wasn't the murder weapon. The judge himself finds the knife in his garden and quickly puts two and two together, but Barbara has bribed the dim-witted maid, Anushka, to say it was she that Quirin was visiting.
