"Dance, Fools, Dance" is clearly based on two infamous incidents in Chicago crime history: the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre in a garage and the June 9, 1930 murder of Chicago Tribune reporter Jake Lingle, who was shot while heading to a train station. However, unlike the movie's Bert Scranton, Lingle was a shady character who played both sides of the law and had parlayed a $65 a week salary into a $60,000 income. In journalistic terms, Lingle was known as a legman who would telephone in the salient details of the story which would be actually written by a rewrite man. This is what happens when Joan Crawford's Bonnie phones in her story after the shootout.
Before this movie Joan Crawford told people not to have affairs with their leading men until they made three movies together. She and Clark Gable had only made two together, but they started to have an affair during this movie. Afterwards Crawford said she had to eat her words, but that they tasted sweet.
This is the first of eight films that starred Joan Crawford and Clark Gable released from 1931 to 1940.
The actor William Holden who plays Stanley Jordan in this film is not the same actor who was a big star of the 1950s. In fact, they're not even related. The latter William Holden was born William Beedle, Jr. in 1918. He reportedly took the stage name Holden at the suggestion of an assistant director at Columbia who was formerly married to actress Gloria Holden and still carried a torch for her. The William Holden in this film was a veteran character actor. Unfortunately, he would make only two more films before passing away from a stroke in 1932 at age 69.
This film was a hit at the box office, earning MGM a profit of $524,000 ($10.8M in 2023) according to studio records.