Acting
A silent film from 1928.
Minor silent action hero James F. Fulton starred in this low-budget melodrama distributed by Poverty Row company Hi-Mark. Fulton, who would later play The Air Mail Pilot and direct the airborne serial The Eagle of the Night (both 1928), here starred as a lumberjack whose thrill-seeking girlfriend (Ruth Clifford) is kidnapped by a romantic rival (Robert McKim).
1928 was the last year when silent films dominated the market, and this aviation-based action serial from Pathe was one of the studio's last. Some pieces are no longer extant (half of chapters 3&6, all of 7, 8, and 9, and the beginning of the 10th and final chapter), but the beginning and end are there as well as enough to follow the action adequately. The surviving Grapevine print is beautifully restored and tinted in spots, although you can tell the print is deteriorated in some of the surviving sections. Basically, an inventor (Josef Swickard, in a role not unlike the one he later played in THE LOST CITY) has created a silencer/muffler for planes to silence any engine sounds, and the bad guys are out to steal the invention and put it to evil use.
The owner of a shipping line arranges to have his waster son shanghaied on one of his vessels commanded by the tough Captain Svenson. But the son discovers in time and gives them the slip. Instead a clerk working for the company Dick Marlow, engaged to his sister Miriam, is taken instead.
A high-flying action film involving a pilot battling air mail robberies.
