Love or Justice

Louise Glaum is a tough egg, a leading light of the underworld. Charles Gunn -- he would die the following year of the Spanish Influenza -- is a lawyer, brought low by drug addiction. Glaum calls him a weakling, and helps him get the monkey off his back. He offers her marriage, but she's contemptuous of society's norms, so it's off to respectable society and the District Attorney's office. Yet Miss Glaum realizes she has changed too, so she quits the rackets, gets a respectable job, and pushes away her old associates. One of them decides to frame her, and in the attempt, he winds up dead... and Gunn is ordered to prosecute her, and get a conviction, lest the entire office lose their jobs.

It's a potboiler from Thomas Ince Productions, with a script by Lambert Hillyer - he would turn director the following month -- and there's a lot of high-flown language in the titles, and hand-waving as to procedure. Still, there's a nice perverse set of motives here: Gunn believes her innocent, and she knows he'll lose his job.... so who will look out for their own interests?