Black Roses on AllMovie

Veteran Japanese star Sessue Hayakawa both produced and starred in this melodramatic silent crime drama which co-starred his wife Tsuru Aoki. Hayakawa played Yoda, a Japanese architect hired as groundskeeper for retired criminal Benson Burleigh (Andrew Robson). Burleigh is murdered by members of his former gang -- Monocle Harry (Henry Hebert), Blanche De Vore (Myrtle Stedman) and Wang Fu (Toyo Fujita) -- who successfully frame Yoda for the murder, and kidnap his wife Blossom (Aoki). Yoda escapes from the law, however, and assumes the identity of a Japanese nobleman. Pretending to be in the market to buy a wife, the "nobleman" is lead to Blossom's hiding place. There is a climactic struggle and in the presense of the police, Blanche and Harry are made to confess. Discovered by producer Thomas H. Ince, the Hayakawas would appear in more than 20 films together, the last of which was Hell to Eternity in 1960.