Edith Hardy a venal, spoiled stockbroker’s wife impulsively embezzles $10,000 from the charity she chairs and desperately turns to a Hishuru Tori, a rich Japanese ivory merchant (or, in the 1918 re-release, Haka Arakau, a rich Burmese ivory merchant).

Exotic interiors and mysterious screen doors abound in Cecil B. DeMille’s taut classic, which envisions the nascent medium of cinema as a shadowplay of morality. Bringing a seductive aura to his villainous role, Sessue Hayakawa shot to fame as one the first major Asian stars of the silent era.