Adapted from Shakespeare's play: Baptista Minola, a wealthy resident of Padua, is the father of Katherine and Bianca. The younger daughter, Bianca, is charming and has many suitors. But her father will not allow Bianca to be married until her older sister, who is notoriously quarrelsome and bad-tempered, is married first. When Petruchio comes from Verona to Padua in search of a wife, he hears of this situation, and he accepts the challenge of trying to woo and marry the ill-natured Katherine.
The film tells the tale of three ex-cons who finally go straight, through the redemptive power of love. After rescuing Mary from certain death, the “three bad men” meet her saintly mother and stay on to help on their farm. In The Hidden Way, two of the ex-cons conspire to steal the family’s tiny nest egg, but through plot twists involving a medicinal spring, a wronged woman, a villainous Casanova, his avaricious father, and government inspectors (!), the pair eventually see their error and join the third in turning over a new leaf.
John Smart (William Haines), a hack writer, inherits a fortune from a distant relative and buys a castle in Laupheim. He pursues what appears to be a ghost of a beautiful woman but he learns that the so-called ghost is the estranged wife, Countess von Pless (Madge Bellamy), of the castle's previous owner, the cruel Count von Pless (Stuart Holmes). A romance blossoms despite the efforts of Count von Pless to convict Smart of obstructing justice.
