The screenplay by Isobel Lennart focuses on an aspiring model who leaves her small town in the Midwest to seek fame and fortune in New York City.

As a favor to her attorney friend Jim Leversoe, she spends some time with Steve Harleigh, a Montana copper-mine owner in New York on business.

Motion Picture Production Code administrator Joseph Breen rejected the original script as unacceptable, terming it "shocking and highly offensive" for its portrayal of "adultery and commercialized prostitution," while a revised version was found to have "insufficient compensating moral values."

In order to bring the story into agreement with the Production Code, screenwriter Isobel Lennart was required to "show that the adulterous situation is wrong and that sinners must be punished for their sin.

Lana Turner initially refused to star in the film, but MGM executives Louis B. Mayer and Dore Schary demanded that she honor her contract with the studio.

[citation needed] Kaper was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score but lost to Franz Waxman for Sunset Boulevard.

In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther wrote: Somehow, while watching this picture, with its cliches, its lush inanities and its vacuum-sealed preoccupation with the two-bit emotions of one dame.

And so we have the present item, with Miss Turner playing the glittering role of the model with the airiness and manners of a sales clerk in a chic department store, plainly self-conscious of her hair-do, her clothing, her billing and her bust.

And we have poor Ray Milland playing the Montana sap who falls for her with a perpetual air of discomfort, indicating that he had read the script.

But ... Cukor, while he may be able to make the fair sound good, to impart a certain sparkle and bite to the obvious, cannot sustain the whole illusion himself for nearly two hours.