Vanity's Price

Vanity's Price is a lost[1] 1924 American silent drama film directed by Roy William Neill and starring Anna Q. Nilsson.

[4] Von Sternberg, in his 1965 autobiography recalls: Two incidents had been left out of the supposedly completed Vanity’s Price, which the director [Roy William Neill] had not considered worthwhile doing, and the studio [FBO] head now pleaded with me to direct those short episodes.”[5] One of the scenes concerned a young couple on a park bench, in love.

The other involved a surgery in which a woman is operated in a therapeutic procedure related to the "Monkey gland" theory of Serge Voronoff.

Von Sternberg writes: I gave orders to build an operating theatre with a deep pit and circular rows of seats rising steeply above the other to make it look like a cockfight arena.

[6][7]When the picture was previewed this sequence was praised by critics and von Sternberg was offered a position as director at FBO studios, but he turned it down to make an independently financed film, The Salvation Hunters (1925).