An extreme rarity, Paid to Love is Howard Hawks' third feature. The story is a light-spirited tale about a mythical kingdom whose crown prince is obsessed with cars, to the neglect of women. An American banker insists the king marry to preserve the security of the kingdom, and takes him to Paris to find a suitable woman. They find her in an apache cafe, where she puts on a knife-throwing act every night. "Hawks has gone on record as not liking this film, and thus it has been unofficially suppressed.... However, it is quite one of the better films among his surviving silents, infinitely superior to A Girl in Every Port (admittedly a more important film because of its more typically Hawksian ingredients), and much funnier than the arch Fig Leaves. True, in the realm of romantic comedy, Hawks is no Lubitsch and really needs the pace and speech of talkies. The comedic elements here are played broadly and the romantic/sexual ingredients directed for poignancy rather than piquancy. George O'Brien's marvelous sense of humor is largely unexploited, and William Powell's assured villainy draws much more interest and attention than was probably intended. It's uneven-but it's also lush, handsome and generally unpredictable, in addition to the merit of brevity." William K. Everson