AllMovie

A then-topical drama set among recent immigrants in a Lower East Side tenement, Bound on the Wheel was the first of two Universal potboilers to team Lon Chaney with writer/director/actress Elsie Jane Wilson. Wilson plays the German Cora, who, against her own better judgment, marries a young Irish neighbor Tom (Chaney). Like his father before him, Tom becomes an alcoholic, and when a rich family friend, Hans (Arthur Shirley), arrives from Germany, he plots to rob the visitor. Tom gets his comeuppance, however, when on a drunken binge, he consumes a glass of poisoned water prepared by a suicidal Cora. With her brutish sod of a husband dead and buried, Cora finds happiness at last with Hans. This film, very typical of its time, was directed and written by the husband-and-wife team of Joseph de Grasse and Ida May Park.