Janet Beecher

Gangster Buck Gordon hopes his son Nick will follow in his criminal footsteps, but his efforts are foiled by his ex-wife, who has married Governor Bancroft (Standing). Furious, Buck blackmails his ex-wife, threatening to expose her shady past to her new husband. Nick comes to his mother's aid by shooting and killing his father, but refuses to give a motive, even when he is sentenced to hang for the crime. Based on the play, "The Noose."

After her father loses everything in the stock market crash, a well-known woman from the Barbary Coast sacrifices love to try her hand at card games.

In the years before World War I, vaudevillian Vernon Castle (Astaire) discovers that he shares a passion for dancing with Irene Foote (Rogers).