Details

Release year: 1923

Storyline

A Manhattan playboy falls in love with a mysterious European woman whom he notices as an exact double for a famous socialite who disappeared at the turn of the century. At first, he thinks it's just pure coincidence, as the beautiful young woman he's currently romancing is much younger than the woman who vanished years before, but he soon starts to believe that it's not such a coincidence after all.

Top credits

Directors

Frank Lloyd

Writers

Cast

Corinne Griffith — Madame Zatianny, Mary Ogden
Conway Tearle — Lee Clavering
Tom Ricketts — Charles Dinwiddie
Tom Guise — Judge Gavin Trent

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Did you know

• The version of this film presently marketed on DVD consists of the first 5 reels, with the last 3 reels missing. From the American Film Institute Catalog of Feature Films, we get a brief synopsis of the missing footage which follows: "Lee Clavering (Conway Tearle) plans to marry the Countess Zatianny (Corinne Griffith), but a former admirer of hers intervenes, points out her folly, and escorts her back to Austria. Lee finds romance with flapper Janet Oglethorpe (Clara Bow)."

• The book Janet (Clara Bow) reads is the flapper novel "Flaming Youth" by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Adams used the pseudonym Warner Fabian when writing the book, fearing that the controversy over its frank depiction of female sexuality would ruin his reputation as an author. It was made into the 1923 film of the same name starring Colleen Moore.

• Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald cited Gertrude Atherton's Black Oxen (1923), Samuel Hopkins Adams's Flaming Youth (1923), and Edith Maude Hull's The Sheik (1921) as among a small number of literary works capturing the cultural zeitgeist of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald asserted that "Black Oxen" captured the era's obsession with eternal youth, "Flaming Youth" persuaded readers "that girls are sometimes seduced without being ruined," and "The Sheik" showed that even non-consensual courtship isn't entirely harmful. Due to film censorship, Fitzgerald argued that only the film adaptation of Flaming Youth (1923) captured the era's sexual revolution. A century later, only the film adaptation of The Sheik (1921) survives in its entirety.