Emil Jannings won "Best Actor" Oscar for this film which is the only lost Academy Award-winning performance.

A poor quality two second clip of this lost film is in the 1939 documentary "Cavalcade Of Academy Awards", which highlights past achievements of the Academy Awards, and the 1939 ceremony. It is sporadically shown on Turner Classic Movies.

In her autobiography, "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim A Writer in Early Hollywood", Frederica Sagor claims that the original screenplay for this film was written by her husband, Ernest Maas. The story - of a man who abandons his family - was loosely based on Ernest's own father, who had an affair with his sister-in-law and destroyed two families in the process. As a fellow German-American, and working in the nascent film industry, Ernest knew Emil Jannings personally and gave him a copy of the original screenplay. Later, he learned that Jannings had taken it to another director (and studio) and they'd stolen it; this was common in the early film industry.

Northern Illinois University owns a 17 min film strip entitled movie milestones, no.2. (1936) in which this lost film is featured as one of four clips. The others are The Ten Commandments, Old Ironsides and Behind the Front.


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