A new picture starring Richard Barthelmess and Dorothy Gish should have been an easy sell to the cinema going public, but by all accounts The Beautiful City was a lacklustre affair, a melodrama that in the words of the Photoplay Magazine Review was in dire need of some ‘PEP‘.
As it is the synopsis reads like a fairly typical potboiler melodrama with Richard Barthelmess playing a poor Italian flower vendor in New York City who becomes embroiled in a gang run by Nick da Silva, played by Powell. Reading from the reviews I can imagine that in this lost film, Barthelmess would play his usual cornpone innocent, Dorothy Gish the cutesy love interest with William Powell reprising his Italian villain trope and perhaps this is where the picture starts to lose interest. Once the players revert to familiar types, you get the impression that the ensemble were almost ‘phoning it in’.
However, William Powell’s consistency as a performer continued to be noted, with Mordaunt Hall remarking that he ‘… makes the villainy as impressive as possible.’
References/Recommended Reading:
William Powell: The Life and Films – Roger Bryant
Review by Mordaunt Hall, New York Times, 23 November 1925
Photoplay Magazine, January 1926, p.48
That William Powell Site 
I’ll have to check this one out.
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