Children Of Divorce, 1927 starring Clara Bow and Gary Cooper

Children of Divorce is a 1927 American silent romantic drama film directed by Frank Lloyd and starring Clara Bow, Esther Ralston, and Gary Cooper. Adapted from the 1927 novel of the same name by Owen Johnson, and written by Louis D. Lighton, Hope Loring, Alfred Hustwick, and Adela Rogers St. Johns, the film is about a young flapper who tricks her wealthy friend into marrying her during a night of drunken revelry. Even though she knows that he is in love with another woman, she refuses to grant him a divorce and repeat the mistake of her divorced parents. Produced by Jesse L. Lasky, E. Lloyd Sheldon, and Adolph Zukor for the Famous Players–Lasky, the film was released on April 25, 1927 by Paramount Pictures.

Director Frank Lloyd’s film was deemed commercially nonviable by Paramount publicists. With one million dollars already invested in the picture, studio executives were loath to shelve the production. Josef von Sternberg, recently enlisted as an assistant director at Paramount, was tasked with “salvaging” Children of Divorce by rewriting the text of the intertitles. Von Sternberg, in his 1965 autobiography, reports that he declined the intertitle revision, but assured producer B. P. Schulberg that he could “reshoot half the film in three days and turn over a successful version to him.” Schulberg accepted the offer.