The Green Hat (photoplay title: OUTCAST LADY) [Photoplay Edition]

New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Very Good in Very Good dj. [1934] (c.1924). First Edition Thus. Hardcover. [modest wear to book extremties, minor soiling to edges of text block; the jacket shows some wear, and a few small nicks, along the top and bottom edges, with some minor creasing at the bottom edge of the front panel, light soiling to the rear panel, moderate fading to the spine]. (B&W photographic endpapers) Photoplay edition, a tie-in with the 1934 M-G-M film adaptation, entitled OUTCAST LADY, which starred Constance Bennett (who another bookseller offering this title seems to think is Marlene Dietrich) and Herbert Marshall (he of the wooden leg), and was directed by Robert Z. Leonard. This was Arlen's third novel, and its original success in both England and America catapulted its Armenian-born author to fame and fortune. The melodramatic story features a "shameless, shameful" woman who leads a hedonistic life in the mad whirl of London society as a rather perverse way of protecting the reputation of her dead husband, who had committed suicide on their wedding night. Written in what one critic called an "opium dream style," the book spawned both stage and film adaptations, all of which were bowdlerized to some degree due to story elements involving venereal disease and homosexuality. The 1925 stage version ran concurrently in New York and London, with Katharine Cornell and Tallulah Bankhead the respective headliners. The book and play were scandalous enough that the first film version, A WOMAN OF AFFAIRS (1928) with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, bore only the discreet credit "from the story by Michael Arlen"; although by the time M-G-M got around to making this second version they at least credited the novel, they felt compelled (possibly due to the newly-tighted screws of the Production Code) to slap yet another title on it. Reflecting the belt-tightening that affected mid-Depression-era photoplay editions, this one eschews bound-in movie stills in favor of a montage of scenes on the endpapers (16 tiny photos altogether). .