L'amazzone mascherata (1914)

Countess Franca and her husband Alberto, a cavalry lieutenant, organize a charity evening at a circus, where various amateurs—including the countess herself, as a horsewoman—are to perform. The couple makes use of the circus director Jean Sterosky’s facilities and know-how. Lieutenant Alberto is considered a skilled strategist, and after handing him some top-secret documents, the general entrusts him with drawing up a plan to mobilize the army. Alberto gets to work, then locks his plan and the related documents in a safe. However, Sterosky turns out to be a spy for Rugaria, a neighboring foreign power and potential enemy, and by means of a trick manages to open the safe and seize the packet. As a result, having lost the documents, Alberto is sentenced to two years in prison for treason. Franca is convinced her husband is innocent, and when the butler shows her a mismatched cufflink bearing the initials J. S., which he found on the floor beneath the safe and which very likely belonged to the thief, she becomes convinced that Jean Sterosky is the culprit and resolves to go to Rugaria with the butler to investigate. Countess Franca’s hunch proves correct: Sterosky has indeed handed the stolen documents to his country’s prime minister and received a generous reward in return. In Rugaria, Franca gets hired as a horsewoman at the Milano Circus and becomes a great success. Her stage name is “The Masked Amazon,” since she never shows herself to anyone, inside or outside the circus, without her mask. Franca manages to attract Sterosky’s attention and get herself invited to his home. On that occasion, she removes her mask—astonishing the man—and, while holding the spy at gunpoint with a revolver, makes him hand over not the plans (which have already been turned over to the government), but the correspondence Sterosky had conducted with the prime minister, which is enough to clear her husband. Then she leaves the apartment and flees. The butler helps her, stopping the spy at the entrance to the house and picking up from the floor a set of papers that the countess had dropped in her haste to escape. Franca boards a train to return home. Sterovsky, for some reason—perhaps to avoid damaging his reputation as a spy, perhaps to avoid having his reward reduced—takes great pains to stop Countess Franca and has an arrest warrant and an expulsion order issued against her. Franca is stopped at the border station; her documents are confiscated and she is sent away. It would seem, then, that everything had been in vain. But the butler—who has presumably taken the next train at his leisure—returns home and gives Countess Franca the paper she had lost while fleeing Sterovsky’s house. It turns out to be more than enough to clear Alberto, who is acquitted of the charges and released from prison on its basis.