The film was based on the 1891 short story Lord Arthur Savile's Crime by Oscar Wilde.
[4] After being told by a fortune teller named Septimus R. Podgers that he is destined to be a murderer, an aristocrat named Lord Arthur Saville decides to commit a murder before his impending marriage, so his marriage will not be sullied.
When his fiancé Sybil later finds the poison pill among his deceased aunt's belongings, he realizes he did not murder her after all.
After a few more failed attempts to kill someone, he returns to the fortune teller and winds up pushing her into the Thames, where she drowns.
Free at last, he marries Sybil, but learns many years later that the fortune teller he killed had been a total fraud with no powers of prediction whatsoever.