 Vidor made this film, the last of a cycle of four films,in the years just following WWI.The isolationist outlook of many Americans with regard to war-ravaged Europe prompted Vidor to locate the sources of “sexual experimentation and marital triangles” and other social infidelities of the Jazz Age in the Old World.Decadent European manners were contrasted with the fundamentally commonsense virtues that Vidor believed would prevail in the United States.