Vanity's Price

Vanity's Price (1924)

Successful actress Vanna Du Maurier ignores her friends' advice and overworks herself toward her goal of having her own theater. She is introduced to Henri De Greve, a millionaire who might help her, but she recognizes him to be her former husband, the father of her son, Teddy, and therefore refuses to have anything to do with him. The shock of seeing him is hard on Vanna, and fearing the loss of her youthful beauty, she visits a physician in Vienna to be rejuvenated. Vanna returns thoroughly changed and even invites the attentions of De Greve when she realizes his interest in Sylvia Grayson, Teddy's sweetheart. Teddy turns against his mother, Sylvia attempts to drown herself, and Vanna lures De Greve to her boudoir, where she discloses his past and gives him a beating with a riding crop. Sylvia and Teddy are reunited and forgive Vanna, who now recognizes the folly of vanity and accepts the proposal of long-time admirer Richard Dowling. This film is lost.

Date of release
1924-09-07
TMDB
8.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 0m
Genres
Drama
Director
Roy William Neill

Casting

Interesting facts

Vanity's Price is a 1924 American silent drama film directed by Roy William Neill and starring Anna Q. Nilsson. It was produced by the Gothic Productions company and released by FBO.

Production

Von Sternberg, in his 1965 autobiography recalls:

Two incidents had been left out of the supposedly completed Vanity’s Price, which the director [Roy William Neill] had not considered worthwhile doing, and the studio [FBO] head now pleaded with me to direct those short episodes.” One of the scenes concerned a young couple on a park bench, in love. The other involved a surgery in which a woman is operated in a therapeutic procedure related to the "Monkey gland" theory of Serge Voronoff.

I gave orders to build an operating theatre with a deep pit and circular rows of seats rising steeply above the other to make it look like a cockfight arena. I planned to have the student physicians watch the surgery through binoculars with an occasional ironic grin.

When the picture was previewed this sequence was praised by critics and von Sternberg was offered a position as director at FBO studios, but he turned it down to make an independently financed film, The Salvation Hunters (1925).

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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