As well as featuring some scenes with dialogue rendered in rhyming couplets, the film is notable as an example of Hollywood's attitude to abstract art in the 1930s. The hero is a no-nonsense representational artist from Tennessee, who, transplanted to Paris, meets a crowd of pretentious types in a Montparnasse garret. Chief among them is an artist who believes in depicting the soul of an object rather than the object itself. Played by comic star Charlie Ruggles, his name is "Crock" (one of the meanings of which, ironically, is scam or con, in American vernacular English).
