The year is 1906. A cattle rancher from Montana visits the Barbary Coast -- the red light district in San Francisco -- where he intends to collect a debt. He meets a casino singer and falls in love with her. He gambles his collected money and loses. He goes back to Montana, but has plans to return to the Barbary Coast.
This film revolves around a problem it imposes on itself: how to make the girl leave her current lover for the protagonist. It ingeniously sets up situations of stress that reveal her current lover's shortcomings as a lover (which somehow are implied to be correlated with his shortcomings as a person); an earthquake which nearly makes her paralyzed is required to make her at last switch lovers. The film contrasts the moral integrity of the rural environment with the corruption of the urban one, but takes all its thrills from the latter, and none from the former. I guess this is dialectics in action, although some might prefer to call it hypocrisy. The film is competently written and realized, albeit within that clearly artificial frame.
Rating: 43
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