Wege des Schreckens (1921)

Two large factories—the Greenwich Works, owned by James Stephenson, and the Southampton Works, controlled by Thomas Racton—are to merge at Racton’s insistence, so they will no longer compete with each other and can benefit from possible synergies. Racton, who is strongly pushing for the merger, believes the best way to achieve this is for his daughter Gabriele Racton to marry the young Greenwich heir, Edmond Stephenson. But the bespectacled Gabriele is not Edmond’s type at all; instead, he has his eye on pretty but penniless Mary Darnley, a distant relative of the Ractons who leads a Cinderella-like existence among her wealthy relations. Edmond therefore writes to Racton to inform him of his decision not to marry Gabriele. When Edmond and Mary’s secret romance is soon discovered, old Racton promptly throws Mary out of his house. Until then, Mary has no idea that Edmond is a wealthy member of the Greenwich Company. She returns to the modest home she shares with her elderly, ailing mother. Misery reigns there, especially since Mrs. Darnley also has a good-for-nothing son, Mary’s brother Harry, who does nothing but cause trouble. Lazy and unscrupulous, he tries to make money through gambling rather than by doing honest work. Horrified by this, Mary decides to find a job so she can help support her struggling mother. Soon she gets a position in the Greenwich Company’s office, where she also encounters her secret love, Edmond, again. Meanwhile, Harry has once again landed himself in a serious predicament: he is caught cheating at cards in a dive. As soon as the police arrive, a violent brawl breaks out. The furnishings are smashed and shots are fired. A policeman is killed. Harry manages to leap out of a window and escape. He knocks down a passing motorcyclist, steals his vehicle, and speeds away. He goes straight to Mary to ask for her help yet again. Edmond sees the silhouettes of the two siblings through the curtains and mistakenly believes that Mary is meeting another man with whom she is cheating on him. To avoid putting her brother in even greater danger, Mary does not correct Edmond’s misunderstanding. To make matters worse, Harry also steals from Stephenson’s company till and empties the safe using a duplicate key he has taken from Mary. Mary is immediately suspected, and old Mr. Stephenson fires her, telling her never to show her face there again. Head bowed and at a loss, Mary leaves and boards a train. She has no idea that Harry, still on the run, has secretly boarded the train too in an effort to escape his pursuers. During the journey, he crawls over the carriage roofs to reach the luggage van. He wants to find Mary’s suitcase and put the stolen money back, for suddenly he has begun to feel something like remorse. But because of Harry’s carelessness, the entire carriage catches fire, and he can no longer carry out his good deed of contrition. Before long, the strong wind of the train’s motion engulfs the entire train in flames and smoke. In the end, despite the arrival of the fire brigades, all that is left of the train is its bare iron framework. Mary and the other passengers, some of them seriously injured, are rescued and taken to the nearest hospital. There, Mary lapses into a feverish delirium. Meanwhile, Edmond, unaware of what has happened, is deeply shaken by the events surrounding Mary’s dismissal from the company. Then Harry visits him, remorsefully returning the stolen money and confessing to the crime. Edmond realizes that Mary has been wronged twice over: she did not steal anything, and Harry, her brother—the man Edmond had seen through the curtains—was not Mary’s lover. Edmond is determined to make amends to Mary and searches for her, but cannot find her. Only after a year is he able to track down his former great love. She has become a cocotte who moves in high society among men. Now profoundly changed, inside and out, Mary tells Harry how her traumatic experiences—during which their mother also died—have affected her new life. She is now far less moral and less troubled by scruples, and lets strange men support her financially. So, like Harry, Mary too seems to have chosen one of the titular “paths of terror.” Edmond is devastated by Mary’s words, but still believes that his former great love may not be lost to him after all. Meanwhile, Harry has fallen back into his old ways. One day, when the police corner him, he escapes again, scrambling over obstacles and climbing the framework of an iron structure. From there he swings onto a cargo basket on a cableway that is meant to carry him to the other side of a river. Halfway across, he jumps into the cold water, crawls ashore, and reaches a country road. A car suddenly speeds toward him—driven by Mary, of all people—and hits the rascal, hurling him across the road. Harry nevertheless manages to get back up and continues his flight. He climbs a chimney by its lightning conductor and, from the top, fires a revolver at the pursuing police officers. Harry is hit too and ends up hanging from the chimney. The authorities resort to drastic measures to bring him down: they simply blow up the entire chimney. In a cloud of dust and rubble, Harry dies beneath the debris that buries him. By now, Edmond and Mary have reached the factory grounds and found each other again. They have to witness the crook’s ignominious end, but they also sense that this may finally be the beginning of their love and a life together.