Humphrey Bogart was originally chosen to play Harold Goff. However, Ida Lupino had just finished shooting They Drive by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1940) with Bogart, and they had not gotten along. Lupino protested, and because she was a bigger name than Bogart at the time, she got her way. An angry Bogart shot off a telegram to Jack L. Warner asking, "When did Ida Lupino start casting films at your studio?"
After the courtroom scene, when Jonah and Olaf stop in front of a music hall to exchange a couple of words, the music coming out of the hall is "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down", better known as the theme from the Looney Tunes cartoons, another Warner Brothers property.
This film and The Maltese Falcon (1941), which was released the same year, helped set the tone for even darker and more cynical noirs that would follow, like Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).
This is one of four movies in which Ida Lupino and John Garfield appeared together; the others are: The Sea Wolf (1941), Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), and Hollywood Canteen (1944).
For this film, which is based on Irwin Shaw's play "The Gentle People", nearly all of the characters' names were changed.