Best remembered for his epic dramas, Stiller also had a fine touch with comedies of manner, later so successfully exploited by Hollywood emigrés like Lubitsch and Wilder. For the title role of Thomas Graal, Stiller cast his cohort Victor Sjöström who delivers a precise, sprightly performance. The story concerns Graal, a love-sick screenwriter, who strikes out with his elusive secretary, Bessie, and composes a script, "The Little Adventuress," to compensate for his misfired romance. Naturally, Graal imagines Bessie, played with mischievous flair by Karin Molander, as a vulnerable, poor girl tyrannized by her parents. Stiller cuts between Graal's dilemma and melodramatic scenes from the script to create one of the first self-conscious film parodies. Peter Cowie writes: "The web of flashbacks, day-dreams, and factual incidents is almost as baffling as that of Hiroshima Mon Amour and yet never once is the jocular tone of the film weighed down by this complicated structure... Stiller blends fantasy and reality with a smooth, suave magic that both satirizes the movie industry and also demonstrates the illusionist properties of this emergent medium. Perhaps Stiller's supreme talent was for infusing his principal players with a spirited impudence that makes other performances of the period look academic and ponderous."