According to director John Sturges in Emmanuel Laborie's book, "Sturges: a filmmaker's story", Sturges was frightened directing Spencer Tracy, considered a living legend. At the beginning, he was just stuck on the storyboard and choosing good camera angles, and did not dare to interfere in Tracy's way of acting. That changed when Tracy, rehearsing a scene while Sturges was looking at it through the eye-piece of the camera, suddenly took off his jacket and hung it on the camera lens blocking up Sturges' view. Then Tracy took Sturges aside and said, "John, can you stop only worrying about your camera and take care about the actors, because the camera is only a hungry machine, and it will not be satisfied if you feed it with junk food."
Although almost all of the film takes place in New York City, there is less than five minutes of footage filmed on-location in New York City.
As stated by Eddie Muller in his TCM "Noir Alley" introduction of the movie on Jul 13, 2019, Gustav Garfield was paid $5,000 to avoid a plagiarism charge for a short story called "Murder in Jest" after the studio paid a reported $40,000 to NYC Asst. District Atty. Eleazar Lipsky for the script.