Drifting

A 1923 silent melodrama directed by Tod Browning and set in the opium underworld of Shanghai. Priscilla Dean plays Cassie Cook, an American woman smuggling opium who falls under the surveillance of a government agent disguised as a mining engineer. When she falls in love with him, she tries to leave the drug trade, but the head of the ring will not let her go. Wallace Beery plays her menacing confederate, and Anna May Wong appears in a supporting role. The film is based on the 1910 Broadway play by John Colton and Daisy H. Andrews and was produced by Carl Laemmle at Universal. It is a precursor to the stranger, darker films Browning would make later in the decade. The film's copyright expired at the end of its first term, and it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.