Otto Lowenstein - The Senses - Pelican - 1966

Ad for Such Men are Dangerous (working title: The Mask of Love; Kenneth Hawks [despite the ad], 1930, Fox Film Corp.) in Exhibitors Herald World, 15 June 1929. The AFI Catalog entry for this film is nuts...

SYNOPSIS: Belgian financier Ludwic Kranz (Warner Baxter), who believes that wealth can buy him anything, marries Elinor (Catherine Dale Owen), a beautiful young girl who is virtually forced into the marriage for financial reasons. She deserts him, repulsed by his disfigured face, and he sails for Germany, leaving the impression that he has committed suicide. There his face is transformed under the care of a plastic surgeon (I assume Dr. Erdmann, played by Bela Lugosi), and he returns to revenge himself on his wife; but when this woman who has despised him actually falls in love with him, he relents and is willing to forget the past.

The film was released in both sound (Movietone) and silent versions (not atypical for the early sound era).

FROM THE AFI CATALOG: On 2 January 1930, while filming a flying sequence for the picture, director Kenneth Hawks (1898 - 1930), assistant director Max Gold, cameramen George Eastman and Conrad Wells, assistant cameramen Otto Jordan and Ben Frankel, prop men Thomas Harris and Henry Johannes, and pilots Hallock Rouse and Ross Cooke were killed in a two-plane, mid-air collision off the coast of San Pedro in Southern California. According to Los Angeles Times news articles in early January 1930, Hawks’ brother, director Howard Hawks, had been at the airfield when the planes took off, but decided not to fly. Kenneth Hawks had been married to actress Mary Astor since 1928.

As noted in reviews, Such Men Are Dangerous was inspired by the life of internationally famous Belgian financier and aviator Alfred Lowenstein (1877 - 1928), who died under mysterious circumstances on 4 July 1928, when he fell from his private plane as it was crossing the English Channel. The highly publicized incident prompted various theories about Lowenstein’s disappearance, from suicide, murder, or, as dramatized in the film, an attempt to escape his old life and start over under a new identity.