The title of the picture presupposes the tropics, the tropics presuppose a disreputable cabaret, and the cabaret presupposes a girl who wants to keep straight or go straight. All these elements are supplied by the studio. Miss Twelvetrees is a stranded entertainer who is discharged when the depression penetrates to the tropics. There is a priceless old harridan of a honky-tonk proprietress, blowsy and affable, disreputable and roguish, who considerately allows Miss Twelvetrees to pick up a little silver from the sailors in a fitful, fretful, and amateurish way. But when she tries to steal passage money for the States from Mr. Charles Bickford, she over-estimates his drunkenness, and is caught red-handed. To save here self from jail, she puts herself in his power; and a particularly unpleasant power it is. Mr. Bickford, though often cast as a hero, is the most disagreeable exponent of brute force on the screen. Unlike Mr. George Bancroft, his forcefulness is simply illmannered, his strength merely churlish.

Nevertheless, it is to Mr. Bickford's prospecting camp that Miss Twelve trees goes as housekeeper. Virtuously she makes out the limits of a housekeeper's duties with the aid of a revolver. One fine day, a long-lost lover comes ahydroplaning down the Orinoco, though it might be the "great, green, greasy Limpopo", for all we care. Interest grows as the young man precipitates a triangle and goes slinking around the house at night whispering to the girl. Later, the story outdoes itself by revealing that the hero isn't a hero after all, but a selfish meanie out for gain.

Miss Twelvetrees has been repeatedly miscast since her first and best picture, "Swing High." An ingenue with an appealing trick of making her eyes tragic and a way of laughing and crying by turns, she would have a great deal to give to a fragile re mane like "Sunrise." But instead, the vastly commonplace Miss Gaynor usurps these roles, and Miss Twelvetrees is forced to play gangsters" molls and cast-off courtesans. It is not her fault that she has had to grimace in the grand manner or shrill thinly in melodrama. In "Panama Flo", she deals more skillfully than before with such material yet it is evident that here face was made for gauze and soft lighting, and her voice for more idyllic liners.