An unknown gang has again broken into a van containing money from the European bank. Banker Sam Hamilton decides to use an armoured car for the next money transport. He hires racing driver Charly Allan as the driver. Allan is invited to Hamilton's house for a party. During a dance with the banker's daughter Bessy he is attacked by bandits, pushed to the ground and Bessy is kidnapped.
Graf Ferdinand Prokesch
Oberleutnant Graf Boris Utomski
Felix - Student
Before road movies there were street films, a distinct cycle within German silent cinema. The essential ingredient - misalliance between bourgeois and slum dweller - is present here, though somewhat displaced by Asta Nielsen's star persona. She plays an aging hooker who falls for handsome Felix, a student who has rowed with his parents and ventured into the lower depths. Dreaming of a new life, she ejects her pimp and invests her savings in a cake shop. Even without that title, though, you wouldn't bet on a happy ending. Nielsen is a quite restrained sort of diva, and Rahn likewise soft pedals the melodrama, except for the grand finale. He died soon after making this, his contemporaries regretting the masterworks the cinema was thus denied. Well, maybe.
Movie by Arthur Bergen starring Mary Nolan (Imogene Robertson).
Count Hohenstein - the Arch-Duke's A.D.C.
The Arch-Duke Herr Sixtus especially cares for Arts and particularly for young ballet students. The same is true of the Arch-Duke A.D.C., Herr Count Paul Paladin who shares with the Arch-Duke a special affection for Frau Elisa Jenkins, a young ballet student. Unexpectedly and thanks to a misunderstanding involving Frau Elisa and the Arch-Duke, the young student will become the new Prima Ballerina of the "Wiener Staatsoper".
Paul
Karl Lüdecke
A taxi driver in Berlin refuses to give up his horse and switch to motor transport.
Willy Klauser
Leutnant Fritz von Gernsdorf
Horst