Frederic March was rather strangely cast as pirate Jean Lafitte, and DeMille's latest "find", Hungarian chanteuse Franciska Gaal, played Gretchen, one third of a romantic triangle that included March and Margot Grahame as "nice girl" Annette. Paramount's "colorful" character actor Akim Tamiroff, a former denizen of the Moscow Art Theater, did one of his patented hyperbolic turns as Dominique You, one of Lafitte's assistants. (Tamiroff's career at Paramount is a fascinating example of just how wide ranging Paramount was in terms of developing star talent—even if Tamiroff never quite caught the brass ring. Once Tamiroff was on board as a Paramount player, the studio worked overtime developing different projects for him, playing up his ability to magically inhabit various characters, almost like Lon Chaney's vaunted "thousand faces". The results were mixed, at best. Tamiroff actually often found himself in mediocre potboilers, as in one of his other 1938 Paramount outings, the really strange Ride a Crooked Mile, where he plays an émigré Cossack cattle rustler who has reinvented himself in Kansas, where he attempts to reconnect with his estranged son, a soldier played by Leif Erickson. Erickson's then-wife, Frances Farmer, is on hand as a Russian cabaret singer. It truly must be seen to be believed, and remains one of the all time weirdest movies from Paramount's late thirties efforts). Walter Brennan, Ian Keith and—wait for it—Anthony Quinn round out the supporting cast of this 1938 version.