Cynthia Meade (Clara Bow), a wild, high spirited New York movie actress, meets Jack Harrison (William Powell), a wealthy young New Yorker, in a Tennessee city. She is hoping he will be able to help her with her movie career, but he demands a relationship in return. A stray bullet comes through the window and he is dangerously wounded while with Cynthia. Realizes how hard it will be to prove her innocence, Cynthea flees, thinking Harrison dead. On a lonely road, Cynthia, half hysterical and nearly exhausted, appeals to Wade Murrell (Warner Baxter), a young mountaineer on the way back to his Kentucky home. He believes that she is running away from danger and takes her with him. Arriving at his house, he is disgusted when he learns she cannot cook or do any of the daily chores of hill women. However, she finally wins the confidence of his mother (Edythe Chapman). Several weeks later, Harrison, the supposedly dead man, appears, saying he is seeking the person who shot and left him for dead. Murrell does not know at first that Cynthia is the person Harrison suspects, and the two become good friends. The presence of a “painted woman,” as the hill people call Cynthia, arouses a terrific antipathy toward Murrell, and he narrowly avoids being killed by one of their number. In the end, Cynthia is forced to choose between her old and new lover, but not before the three have passed through many crises.^[3]

• Clara Bow as Cynthia Meade
• Warner Baxter as Wade Murrell
• William Powell as Jack Harrison
• George Bancroft as Lesher Skidmore
• Edythe Chapman as Mrs. Murrell

With no prints of The Runaway located in any film archives,^[4] it is a lost film.

• The Runaway at IMDb  
• Synopsis at AllMovie
• Lobby card
• Lobby poster
• The Runaway (1926) on YouTube (34 second film segment)