Blonde, patrician Ann Harding was RKO's first big female star. Though she could play sophisticated comedy beautifully, her bread and butter was the confessional genre, three-handkerchief films about women who strayed and paid. With her classy bearing, Harding made those stories moving and less salacious than they might have been. In search of material to exploit that image, the studio cast her in an adaptation of romance writer Louis Bromfield's 1927 story. The film was clearly an attempt to cash in on the success of Universal's Back Street (1932), another tale of a clandestine love affair between a working class woman and a wealthy man trapped in an unhappy marriage. RKO even cast the earlier film's leading man, John Boles, as the politician tricked into marrying only to return to Harding for romantic comfort. When back-street love leaves her pregnant, Boles even adopts their love child. The clock was ticking for these films and Harding's career. The film set box-office records in some cities after the Catholic Church banned it in others. Within months, however, the film industry would accept strict Production Code enforcement, which would keep stories like this off the screen and end Harding's box-office reign.

By Frank Miller