11.19.09
St Louis Adult Entertainment: Rent or Buy
He shows his verses to bookbinder neighbour Karl Etlinger (whose comely daughter, Lil Dagover, dotes on Abel) and he promises to pass them on to a professor whose opinion he trusts. Convinced that literary fame awaits him, Abel scrounges some money from pawnbroker aunt Grete Berger and is duped into borrowing an even bigger sum by Nissen’s dissolute beau Anton Edthofer. But Abel squanders it on a prostitute who resembles De Putti and quickly hits the skids when his poetry is dismissed as doggerel and he is fired for absenteeism. With his mother on her deathbed, Abel is accused of theft by Berger and his sole hope while serving a 20-year sentence is that Dagover can somehow forgive him his folly.
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The diminutive Gaynor is less winsome, as the gamine who resorts to prostitution and theft in order to feed her ailing mother. She is arrested for stealing spaghetti, but manages to give the police the slip and seeks refuge with a travelling circus. However, she qui …