Barbary Coast

Mary Rutledge arrives from the East, finds her fiance dead, and goes to work at the roulette wheel of Louis Charnalis' Bella Donna, a rowdy gambling house in 1850s San Francisco. Mary Rutledge arrives from the east, finds her fiance dead, and goes to work at the roulette wheel of Louis Charnalis' Bella Donna, a rowdy gambling house in San Francisco in the 1850s. She falls in love with miner Carmichael and takes his gold dust at the wheel. As she goes after him, Louis goes after her with intent to harm Carmichael. —Ed Stephan <stephan@cc.wwu.edu> On the Eve of 1850, the ship Flying Cloud from New York arrives in a foggy night in San Francisco. On board, the beautiful Mary Rutledge, who has traveled to marry a owner of a gold mine and befriends the retired Col. Marcus Aurelius Cobb. On the arrival, many men feel attracted by her and she learns that her fiancé is dead, after losing his possessions at the roulette wheel at the Bella Donna, a casino and restaurant owned by the notorious Luis Chamalis. She goes with the men to have dinner at Bella Donna and attracts the attention of Chamalis. He offers a job at the roulette wheel to bring and steal gold miners and she would live in Bella Donna. Further, he calls her "Swan". Soon she sees that Chamalis' right-hand, the killer Knuckles Jacoby, murders his opponents. Meanwhile Col. Cobbs buys a printing machine, but Chamalis does not allow him to write bad things about him. When Knuckles kills Col Cobbs, and other clients of Bella Donna, a group sees that the justice system does not work in San Francisco and is controlled by Luis Chamalis. They decide to create a team of vigilantes to bring law and order back to San Francisco. Meanwhile, Swan meets the gold miner Jim Carmichael and they fall in love with each other. She poses that she is a woman visiting San Francisco, but Carmichael finds the truth about her. However, Chamalis wants "Swan" for him. —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil