However, because of legal issues with Laurette Taylor and her husband J. Hartley Manners—ultimately decided in the United States Supreme Court case Manners v. Morosco—the film was never released.

[6] The enormously popular Broadway actress Laurette Taylor who portrayed the “impish” Peg O’Connell, an 18-year-old Irish orphan girl, was cast to star in the film production and—at the age of thirty-eight (born 1884)—presented certain technical challenges.

[7] The relatively insensitive film stock of the early 1920s required ample lighting to record images, and tended to reveal the chronological age of an actor..

In the film version, Peg's father emerges as an agitator for agrarian land reform, rather than a disaffected manual laborer as in the stage production.

Peg's superiority to her aristocratic relatives is altered by Vidor, and now originates in her class orientation that holds rural populism as a virtue.