Best movies like Inside Straight

California, 1870s. The cowboy Lincoln 'Linc' Bartlett finds out there's a slave auction of Chinese women in San Francisco and he intervenes and purchases the Chinese Kim Sung from the auction with the intent of setting her free. But it doesn't occur to Linc that setting her free isn't enough. Where is she going to go? Kim doesn't speak English and she's just going to be exploited by somebody else. Linc takes Kim home to serve as a housekeeper. Ma Bartlett Linc's mother, is not happy that a Chinese girl is living in her home, and even less happy when Kim and her son fall in love. Their affair also arouses the jealousy of Cheng Lu, a Chinese immigrant.

In San Francisco, a villainous landowner with underworld connections seeks to steal the property of an old Spanish family.

Dreamer dairyman Phineas Dobbs of Cow Hollow suddenly acquires a fortune when oil is discovered on his ranch, and celebrates by throwing a party for the whole town. One day a young woman comes to town, delayed by train trouble. Dobbs rescues her from the town bully, and agrees to follow her to San Francisco.

Jimmie is seeing his single friends get married one by one. He isn't too worried until his girlfriend Anne catches the bouquet at his friend Marco's wedding. Suddenly, his wild mustang days are numbered. He finally decides to propose to her, but he sticks his foot in his mouth and botches the proposal. Being insulted by the defeatist proposal, Anne leaves town on an assignment. After she's gone, he finds out that his recently-deceased grandfather's will stipulates that he gets nothing of a multi-million dollar fortune unless he's married by 6:05pm on his 30th birthday: tomorrow! Not being able to find Anne, Jimmie begins backtracking through his past girlfriends to find a wife.

After Bugs' giant gold nugget is stolen by Nasty Canasta, he tries to win it back at Canasta's San Francisco gambling hall.

Honest Plush Brannon is a con-man thrown out of the Barbary Coast in San Francisco in the 1880s and headed for the gold rush region of Nevada. He discovers a real mine which lead to several complications.

A giant octopus, whose feeding habits have been affected by radiation from H-Bomb tests, rises from the Mindanao Deep to terrorize the California Coast.

After a roustabout sailor avoids being shanghaied in 1850s San Francisco, his audacity helps him rise to a position of power in the vice industry of the infamous Barbary Coast.

A cop framed for a murder he did not commit hunts the San Francisco waterfront for the Mob racketeers who are responsible.

A veteran homicide detective who has witnessed his socialite girlfriend kill her husband sees his inexperienced brother assigned to the case.

A tough, womanizing high-stakes gambler known only as Tennessee has an uneasy relationship with Duchess, madam of a thinly-disguised bordello, and no other friends at all. But he's saved from murder by a lonesome cowpoke ('My friends call me Cowpoke'), in town to meet his fiancée Goldie on the steamboat. When she arrives, there's a mysterious undercurrent between Goldie and Tennessee, whose newfound friendship with Cowpoke is destined to be severely tried...

A San Francisco lawyer uses a woman to lure a merchant seaman worth a legendary fortune.

While on vacation, the Falcon is arrested for kidnapping after striking up a friendship with a girl who's nurse has been recently murdered.

Colonel Ferris, a wealthy farmer in northern California, is strongly opposed to hydraulic mining, a new method developed during the gold rush of the 1870's, which is flooding the area's prosperous farmlands. Despite Ferris' political stance, Jared Whitney, a mining engineer from the East, becomes friends with the colonel's son Lance and falls in love with his daughter Serena. Family tensions deepen when the colonel's brother Ralph gives up farming to go to San Francisco to work for his wife Rosanna's father, Harrison McCooey, a leader in the mining venture. When Lance follows Ralph, the colonel, focusing his anger on Jared, forbids him to see Serena.

All the passengers on an airplane headed for San Francisco are drugged, and when they wake up, it is discovered that a quarter-million dollars is missing. Charlie Chan--and, of course, his #1 son--must discover the identity of the person who doped the passengers and stole the money.

A martial arts instructor must enter the world of illegal pit fighting in order to save his family and his dojo.

Carlo Roma and his foster-son, Toma, and their friend Beppo, are living a happy fisherman's life in San Francisco until Carlo's widowed sister-in-law, Stella, shows up with her brat-son, Rudolph, and takes over. Poor Toma gets his feelings hurt and the idea he "isn't wanted" and runs away

Pier 23 was one of three hour-long mysteries produced by Lippert Productions for both TV and theatrical release. Each of the three films was evenly divided into two half-hour "episodes," and each starred Hugh Beaumont as San Francisco-based amateur sleuth Dennis O'Brien. In Pier 23, O'Brien first tackles the case of a wrestler who has died of a suspicious heart attack after refusing to lose a match. He then agrees to help a priest talk an escaped criminal into returning to prison. The film's two-part structure leads to repetition and predictability, but it's fun to watch TV's "Ward Cleaver" making like Philip Marlowe.

In this verité-style drama, Anthony, a newcomer to San Francisco, attempts to come to terms with his abusive ex-lover when he strikes up an unlikely friendship with a street hustler.

Tony "Wise" Good, is an internationally famous model. He fought his way out of the inner city and rocketed straight to the top. He had it all... The career, the trophy wife, fame, fortune and all the luxuries that come with success. But his swift rise to the top did not take him high enough to protect him from the sudden fall he was about to experience. The corrupt corporate world, the government's support and participation in that corruption, and the jealousy and greed of people he knew best, all lead to a rapid downward spiral into a living hell.

Unjustly booted out of the cavalry, Mike McComb strikes out for Nevada, and deciding never to be used again, ruthlessly works his way up to becoming one of the most powerful silver magnates in the west. His empire begins to fall apart as the other mining combines rise against him and his stubbornness loses him the support of his wife and old friends.

A ship of women embarks on a voyage to California. Director R. G. Springsteen's 1953 adventure drama stars Vera Ralston, David Brian, Virginia Grey, Charles Winninger, Veda Ann Borg and Hope Emerson.

Vincent Price stars in this early '60s adaptation of Thomas De Quincey's thriller about an opium addict trying to solve a mystery in San Francisco's Chinatown.

A young man who steals valuable Oriental objects for a lady friend who operates an antique shop gets mixed up in a twisted murder plot.

Two San Francisco detectives investigating a murder committed on one of the city's famous cable cars discover that the victim was the son of a shipping tycoon. The trail leads to a drug dealer, a shady physician and a nervous police captain

Concentration camp survivor Victoria Kowelska finds herself involved in mystery, greed, and murder when she assumes the identity of a dead friend in order to gain passage to America.

San Francisco has long enjoyed a reputation as the counterculture capital of America, attracting bohemians, mavericks, progressives and activists. With the onset of the digital gold rush, young members of the tech elite are flocking to the West Coast to make their fortunes, and this new wealth is forcing San Francisco to reinvent itself. But as tech innovations lead America into the golden age of digital supremacy, is it changing the heart and soul of their adopted city?

Each morning Donya leaves her tight-knit community of Afghan immigrants in Fremont, California. She crosses the Bay to work at a family-run fortune cookie factory in San Francisco. Donya drifts through her routine, struggling to connect with the culture and people of her new, unfamiliar surroundings while processing complicated feelings about her past as a translator for the U.S. government in Afghanistan. Unable to sleep, she finagles her way into a regular slot with a therapist who grasps for prospective role models. When an unexpected promotion at work thrusts Donya into the position to write her own story, she communicates her loneliness and longing through a concise medium: the fortunes inside each cookie. Donya’s koans travel, making a humble social impact and expanding her world far beyond Fremont and her turbulent past, including an encounter with a quiet auto mechanic who could stand to see his own world expanded.

Brooke's marital life with Eric takes a downturn when she starts suspecting that her husband is starving his son from a prior marriage to death in order to claim his inheritance.

A scorned woman dreams of revenge on the man who betrayed her.

In a rundown apartment complex in San Francisco's Tenderloin, a septuagenarian seer is waiting for his final message. For decades the eccentric recluse has chronicled the phrases of the Wheel of Fortune and deciphered their hidden meaning - the details of a mission to save his neighbors from their troubles.

A lecherous ship captain becomes spiritually changed by a female passenger, not realizing she and her "minister" husband are really bank robbers.

A beautiful heiress is an excellent poker player. Her comfortable life changes when her father and his fortune die during market crash of the 1800's.

After five years of being away, Rick Nelson (Joel McCrea) returns to San Francisco to find it filled with corruption - and crooked politicians. It isn't until he meets a beautiful San Franciscan (Yvonne De Carlo), that Nelson decides to get involved with bringing law-and-order to the city by the bay!

Reckless heir of an influential San Francisco family, Perry Danton must prove his worth by taking a job with the family lawyer before he is entrusted with the Danton fortune.