AllMovie

Evidently never pausing to eat or sleep, director Marshall Neilan dashed off nine full-length features in 1917, of which The Jaguar's Claws was the seventh. Co-written by Beatrice DeMille, the actress-mother of Cecil B. DeMille, the film starred Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa as Mexican bandit chieftain El Jaguar. As the evil El Jaguar, Hayakawa runs afoul of heroic oil superintendent Phil Jordan (Tom Moore). He has both Jordon's wife, Nancy (Marjorie Daw) and sister, Beth Thomas (Fritzi Brunette), kidnapped. When Jordan goes to retrieve them, El Jaguar tells him that he will only release one of them, and the other woman must stay as El Jaguar's mistress. The wife offers herself as a sacrifice, and Beth and Jordan go free. A last-minute rescue -- with, surprisingly, no bloodshed -- enables Marie to return to her husband without compromising her ideals, while El Jaguar meets his doom at the hands of another woman whom he has kept captive. This story sounds pretty silly now, but in its day it was considered a rip-roaring adventure.