The Way of All Flesh is a 1927 film that was written by Lajos Biró, Jules Furthman, Julian Johnson and Ernest Maas from a story by Perley Poore Sheehan. The film was directed by Victor Fleming and is unrelated to Butler's novel The Way of All Flesh.
The film is a melodrama starring Emil Jannings, Belle Bennett and Phyllis Haver. Jannings won the first Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance in this film and his performance in The Last Command (the only year that acting Oscars were awarded for multiple performances).
No known copies of this film are known to survive, making Jannings' the only Oscar-winning performance to no longer exist.
The movie was remade in 1940, starring Akim Tamiroff, Gladys George and William Henry.
Emil Jannings won "Best Actor" Oscar for this film which is the only lost Academy Award-winning performance.
Northern Illinois University owns a 17 min film strip entitled movie milestones, no.2. (1936) in which this lost film is featured as one of four clips. The others are Ten Commandments, The (1923), Old Ironsides (1926) and Behind the Front (1926).
In her autobiography, "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim A Writer in Early Hollywood", Frederica Sagor claims that the original screenplay for this film was written by her husband, Ernest Maas. The story - of a man who abandons his family - was loosely based on Ernest's own father, who had an affair with his sister-in-law and destroyed two families in the process. As a fellow German-American, and working in the nascent film industry, Ernest knew Emil Jannings personally and gave him a copy of the original screenplay. Later, he learned that Jannings had taken it to another director (and studio) and they'd stolen it; this was common in the early film industry.
A poor quality two second clip of this lost film is in the 1939 documentary "Cavalcade Of Academy Awards", which highlights past achievements of the Academy Awards, and the 1939 ceremony. It is sporadically shown on Turner Classic Movies.
