Director Monta Bell, alongside writer Alice D.G. Miller, adapted the story for Man, Woman and Sin from English poet John Masefield’s The Widow in the Bye Street (1912), at the behest of lead actor and uncredited co- director John Gilbert, thereby bypassing Louis B. Mayer, who wasn’t keen on the idea. Being both a seasoned Washington D.C. newspaperman, with a keen eye for a story, and a key mover and shaker in his hometown theatre group, Bell had been made assistant director at the Chaplin Studios and literary advisor on A Woman of Paris, taken under the wing of Walter Wanger at Paramount, then contracted to MGM, directing Greta Garbo in her first Hollywood film, Torrent. Gilbert’s gauche and overgrown newspaper boy, lounging in his lunchbreak, experiences a sexual epiphany, found among the pages of his print publication on encountering the kohl-laden gaze of some gimlet-eyed and game-looking gals, suddenly bringing a whole new slant to this mama’s boy’s existence.
Gladys Brockwell’s roles had latterly leaned to the macabre rather than the maternal, but here she is also praised by “Picture-Play” for portraying “a sympathetic mother with such power and understanding that she ought never to play a heavy villainess again, unless she wants to”.
Having made her name playing Sadie Thompson in repeated runs of Rain on Broadway over several years, this is one of only a dozen film appearances for successful stage actress, Jeanne Eagels, who by the time of filming was a regular abuser of alcohol and drugs, including heroin. Eagels plays Vera, the newspaper’s beautiful society editor who is in a relationship with the paper’s owner, but neglected by him, she turns to the eager and inexperienced Whitcomb, played by Gilbert, and no good comes of it. Ultimately, it’s Eagels’s film.
By the end of 1929, and both in their 30s, Brockwell and Eagels would lose their lives, respectively via an automobile accident and an overdose, the latter receiving the first posthumous Academy Award nomination, for her performance in The Letter (1929).

Michelle Facey