Sylvia Day (Mae Clarke) is working a racket with Tony Grattan where Tony cries out - in a big department store - that he's been robbed and Sylvia runs for the exits. Tony fingers Sylvia as the thief. The department store security guards haul her and Tony into the office of a store manager. Then Tony "discovers" his wallet just slipped down and says that he is very sorry and slips away. Meanwhile Sylvia starts the waterworks and says she has never been so humiliated and intends to sue. She walks away with a five hundred dollar check from the store.
The second time the pair try this they are not so lucky. The insurance company has circulated information about the pair trying this and Sylvia is caught, although Tony gets away. She begs for mercy and says she is not a habitual criminal, and the store manager she is talking to is persuaded, but he needs the OK of his superior, Joe Smith (Ralph Bellamy). Smith says that he can't do that. The insurance company demands that they prosecute or else they cancel the insurance. So Sylvia goes to jail for a year, swearing vengeance against Smith for refusing to even hear her out.
For Sylvia not to be a criminal she certainly and quickly develops the wiles of one. She figures out how to stage a situation in jail where she is the heroine and gets paroled for her bravery. She suddenly sees through her old partner Tony's ulterior motives, AND she manages to frame Smith so that she has him right where she wants him. Smith believes the two were married when he was out on a drunken night on the town celebrating his promotion at the store. The problem is that he is already married to somebody to whom he has been estranged for years but never bothered to divorce, making him a bigamist. And Sylvia knows he is a bigamist. So she makes him go with the ruse that they are legally married so that she doesn't need a job while on parole. Plus she lavishly spends Joe's finite salary on the finest fashions. She says when her parole is over she will let him go about his life. How will this work out? Watch and find out.
Nobody in this situation gets that much sympathy from me, least of all Sylvia. She heard Smith say that it was the insurance company that prevented him from letting her go, but it is his life she chooses to ruin. Joe Smith is fine with thinking he had taken sexual advantage of a complete stranger. He only gets concerned when he thinks he is now married to said stranger.
There are some interesting smaller parts here. Ferdinand Gottschalk as the store owner, Mr. Taylor, is a delight. Although I'd like to think if I was old and lonely, as he says he is, that I would not resort to trying to create surrogate grandchildren and forcing my employees into public displays of affection for my own entertainment. Hale Hamilton is great as Tony, the villain who is much more obvious and not nearly as clever as he thinks that he is.
And finally there is tragic Marie Prevost who, to have such a bit part as far as screen time, plays a very pivotal (and frankly unbelievable) role in the plot. At this point she has lost much of the weight that caused her career to go downhill, but she looks rather ill and haggard too. She'll have only four more credited roles before her death in 1937.
