Production
The film originally was titled The Lullaby. Following its first preview, it was panned by critics, who were impressed by Hayes in her film debut, but thought the plot was conventional and sappy. Producer Irving Thalberg called in playwright Charles MacArthur, who was Hayes' husband, to doctor the script. He thoroughly revised it, omitting inconsequential characters and framing the story as a flashback.
Hayes had begun filming Arrowsmith for Samuel Goldwyn and had to complete that project before shooting her new scenes for the Thalberg film. It was retitled The Sin of Madelon Claudet and opened to widespread acclaim for both Hayes and the film itself.
The film was voted one of the ten best pictures of the year by a Film Daily nationwide poll.
Read more about this topic: The Sin Of Madelon Claudet
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.”
—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)