David Graham Philllips, the novelist who wrote "Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise" was murdered by a mentally unbalanced reader while walking in Grammercy Park, in New York in 1911. The novel was published posthumously, six years later, in 1917. Its subject matter was initially thought to be too risqué.
This film marked the only teaming of Greta Garbo and Clark Gable, when she was an established star and he a promising young actor whom the studio had just signed. Reportedly, they did not get along well, Garbo considering Gable vulgar and he seeing her as stuck-up and remote.
When MGM chief Irving Thalberg found that three secretaries in his outer office remembered the 1917 David Graham Phillips novel well even though it had been missing from bookstores for over ten years, he decided to purchase the screen rights as a vehicle for Garbo.
In the UK, British censors banned the film outright upon it's release on the basis of the novel upon which it was made. However, after some editing, it was approved under a new title, "The Rise of Helga".
This film did well at the box office, earning MGM a profit of $364,000 ($5.6M in 2017) according to studio records.