The Exquisite Sinner is a 1926 American silent drama film directed by Josef von Sternberg and adapted by Alice Duer Miller from the novel Escape by Alden Brooks.

[2][3] The film concerns a young bourgeois Frenchman, Dominique Prad, who spurns his family's lucrative silk business for the bohemian life of an artist.

[4] On the basis of Sternberg's impressive directorial debut, The Salvation Hunters, actor-producer Mary Pickford invited him to direct her next feature and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer brought him under contract.

When Sternberg presented her with a screenplay entitled Backwash that incorporated experimental camera techniques and in which she would play a blind girl, Pickford declined it.

Despite the considerable investment “The Exquisite Sinner was put on hold.” Studio executives hoped “to make it into something [appealing] to a mass audience.” Their ambivalence towards the picture would result in “two versions of the film [screenplays] that MGM was eventually to make and release by 1927.” By the time The Exquisite Sinner had been pulled “Sternberg had already moved to The Masked Bride, the project that would prompt him to walk out on MGM in the summer of 1925” after just two weeks.

[12][13][2][14] In an effort to salvage The Exquisite Sinner, “MGM set its veteran director Phil Rosen to work on a second version of the film…using the same stars.” This demonstrates that the studio was in a position financially and organizationally to delay release of a major production and “in the meantime entirely rescript and reshoot the film under another director in an attempt to produce a certain profit-earner.”[15] The movie was re-scripted as “a bittersweet wartime romance, the studio hoping to emulate the success of King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), which also starred Renée Adorée in a romance with a young Frenchman.

[15][16] Film historian John Baxter describes the Hollywood studio system that was emerging when Sternberg was beginning to make commercial features: "By the 1920s, as the studios that had sprung up in southern California coalesced into an increasingly rigid system for turning out a predictable quantity of commodities for a market approaching saturation, they were developing a repertoire of discursive models with more or less proven ability to generate saleable products.

Writing in the early 1930s documentary filmmaker and critic John Grierson defended the film and its director: "He made a fine picture for Metro called The Exquisite Sinner and had been heaved off the payroll for adding some genuine local color to the Breton scene.

"[2] The National Board of Review, despite the film's poor performance and Sternberg's own misgivings, selected The Exquisite Sinner as among the top forty best pictures of 1926.