Frances Marion's Academy Award for Best Screenplay made her the first woman to win an Oscar in a non-acting capacity.
Hal Roach, who produced his own comedies but released them through MGM, obtained an agreement allowing him to use the prison set from this film for a Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy comedy short. However, as the comedy was being planned, MGM stipulated that Laurel & Hardy would have to make a film for them. Not wanting to loan out his biggest stars, Roach built his own set, an expense so great that the short was expanded to feature length to recoup the cost. The film became Sous les verrous (1931), the pair's first starring feature.
Passing through the MGM canteen one afternoon, Frances Marion spotted Wallace Beery ferociously attacking a plate of spaghetti. This convinced her that he would be ideal for the part of Butch.
In Frances Marion's original script, the characters played by Leila Hyams and Robert Montgomery were husband and wife. After the film flopped in a preview screening, MGM studio executive Irving Thalberg decided that the problem was that audiences, especially women, didn't want to see the Chester Morris character have an affair with a married woman. So the script was rewritten to make Montgomery and Hyams brother and sister. Scenes were reshot, and the film, in its modified form, became a major hit.
Wallace Beery's mess-hall diatribe is parodied by Leslie Nielsen in Y a-t-il un flic pour sauver Hollywood ? (1994), when he goes undercover in the prison and complains about the quality of the food.