To publicize the film, Jack L. Warner, announced that the film's stars, Kenneth Harlan and Marie Prevost, would marry on the film's set. The publicity stunt worked and thousands of fans sent gifts and letters to the couple. However, Warner was unaware that Prevost was still secretly married to her first husband, Sonny Gerke. The Los Angeles Mirror got wind of Prevost's first marriage and ran a story with the headline "Marie Prevost Will Be a Bigamist if She Marries Kenneth Harlan". Warner was livid over the negative publicity and Prevost's failure to disclose her first marriage despite the fact that the publicity stunt was his idea. Warner quickly arranged an annullment, and when the publicity surrounding the scandal died down, Prevost and Harlan quietly married.[4]
Reception
The film did well at the box office and critics were generally favorable. According to Warner Bros. records the film earned $327,000 domestically and $22,000 from foreign markets.[2]
F. Scott Fitzgerald, however, disliked the film. He later wrote to a friend "It's by far the worst movie I've ever seen in my life-cheap, vulgar, ill-constructed and shoddy. We were utterly ashamed of it."[5][6]
Preservation status
The film is currently listed as a lost film,[7] and no copies of The Beautiful and Damned are known to exist. Warner Bros. records of the film's negative have a notation, "Junked 12/27/48" (i.e., December 27, 1948). Warner Bros. destroyed many of its pre-1933 nitrate film negatives in the late 1940s and 1950s due to their decomposition.
^ abcWarner Bros financial information in The William Schaefer Ledger. See Appendix 1, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, (1995) 15:sup1, 1-31 p 1 DOI: 10.1080/01439689508604551
^Tate, Mary Jo (2007). Critical Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Infobase Publishing. p. 32. ISBN978-1-438-10845-2.
^Ankerich, Michael G. (2010). Dangerous Curves atop Hollywood Heels: The Lives, Careers, and Misfortunes of 14 Hard-Luck Girls of the Silent Screen. BearManor. p. 287. ISBN978-1-59393-605-1.
