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Long before he became a highly respected Wall Street financial adviser, Richard Ney was a minor-league film star. In Secret of St. Ives, Ney plays Anatole de Keroual, the unofficial head of a group of French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars. Organizing an escape from his British captors, Anatole leads his fellow prisoners to Scotland, thence to London. Doggedly pursued by nasty British major Chevenish (Henry Daniell), Anatole is recaptured and sentenced to hang. How he wriggles out of this dilemma is the dramatic thrust of the film's last reel. Vanessa Brown co-stars as Floria, Anatole's British sweetheart. The Secret of St. Ives was adapted from a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.