After Director of Photography John Alton agreed to shoot this movie, he asked Producer Benedict Bogeaus how much he had budgeted for rigging - the system of overhead pipes, brackets, ropes, and cables that suspend lights over a film set. Bogeaus told him four thousand dollars. "Give me two thousand dollars above my salary and I won't use any rigging," said Alton. He did it by using almost no overhead lighting at all, contributing to the film's rich visual atmosphere.
Though made on the cheap, and in only nine days, the film manages to dazzle with bravura set-pieces, most memorably the exciting pursuit of a suspect (Jack Elam) through darkened woods that recalls John Alton's film noir classics (Il marchait la nuit (1948) and Incident de frontière (1949)) while looking ahead to Don Siegel's later crime classics.
The shadowy murder scene that opens the film anticipates Richard Brooks' film adaptation of Truman Capote's De sang-froid (1967), the chronicle of a ghastly 1959 multiple murder in Holcomb, Kansas, that was six years in the future.
According to contemporary news items, prior to selling his independent production to RKO head Howard Hughes, Benedict Bogeaus bought star Macdonald Carey's interest in the picture for $50,000.
The picture of the two bullets was clear with no evident damage or rust, so two bullets did not match.