Fritz Lang wanted Spencer Tracy's character to be a lawyer, but the producers thought he should be more of a working man, so he became an auto mechanic.
Terry, better known as Toto from The Wizard of Oz (1939), appears in this film as the dog that Spencer Tracy takes in from the rain at the beginning of the movie, becoming his traveling companion into the netherworld of small-town America.
Script was based upon the 1933 kidnapping and murder of Brooke Hart, the son of the owner of Hart's Department Store in San Jose, California. The two kidnapping suspects were pulled from jail by a group of vigilantes, who dragged them across the street to St. James Park and lynched both of them.
This was actress Sylvia Sidney's only film for MGM, and according to the papers of director Fritz Lang, he stipulated that she be cast in the part before he signed his contract with the studio.
Additional information in the Fritz Lang papers indicates that Walter Brennan, who played "Bugs" Meyers, had an extended illness that necessitated a transfer of some of his "courtroom business" to George Chandler, who played Milton Johnson.
According to modern sources, Fritz Lang was the first filmmaker to use newsreel footage as a courtroom device in a motion picture, and may have done so before it was used in an actual court case.
Joe Wilson:
I am legally dead!
Joe Wilson:
I'll give them a chance that they didn't give me. They will get a legal trial in a legal courtroom. They will have a legal judge and a legal defense. They will get a legal sentence and a legal death.
Katherine Grant:
[to Joe] If those people die, Joe Wilson dies too; you know that, don't you? Wherever you go, whatever you do.
Version of
The Sound of Fury (1950)
- Both movies based on the same true-life story.
References
Metropolis (1927)
M (1931)
Popeye the Sailor (1933)
Referenced in
Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1988)
Featured in
"Fejezetek a film történetéböl: Amerikai filmtípusok - Egyén és társadalom (#1.7)" (1989)
Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream (1998) (TV)