When oil is found in abundance all around her property, Marie Tempest's alone remains gusherless, until her house blows up with more oil than everyone else, combined. She and son Eddie Lyons head off to the big city to crash society, and soon the predators are setting up. Some think the best way to gain her wealth is by stealing her deed. W. Graham Brown and Violet MacMillan, penniless aristocrats, think the way to do it is to marry the pair.
Al Christie made his debut as a feature director with this movie, working from a script written by him, Lyons, and James Dayton. It's a classic country-mouse-comes-to-town plot, and since it is so hoary, it all depends on how it is handled. Miss Tempest, who had appeared in two shorts extracted from her stage successes fifteen years earlier, gives a mixed performance; she is fine until the depredations of the plot kick in towards the end, and then she goes all Delsarte on the audience. Because of her fame, much screen time is spent on her, with the courtship between the younger couple offering more a contrast than a plot.
It's largely presented as a straight drama, with Lyons' usual screen partner, Lee Moran, in a small supporting role as Detective Potts, a character he would use several times to broader effect in shorts. More screen comedy is offered by Harry Rattenberry and Gus Alexander, two nouveau riche millionaires from back home who come to visit.
It remains more a polite comedy of manners than the sort of slapstick that modern people think silent comedy consists of. Christie would make a point of this, claiming he was a standard bearer of better things... until he lost his distribution deal with Universal a few years later and had to scramble for a year.
Miss Tempest reputedly did not enjoy the way movies are shot out of order; it's a common complaint of stage actors, and has a good deal of honesty to it. She went back to the stage. She would also marry her co-star W. Graham Brown in 1922. He was her third husband and they would remain married until his death in 1937. She would appear in a couple of talkie features in her mid-seventies, and die in 1842, age 80.
