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 Pardon Us (1931), the pair's first starring feature.
This movie relaunched Wallace Beery's career. Before the coming of sound, he had been a top supporting player in silent films but had been dropped by his studio when sound came in. With this film being a huge hit, and Beery earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, he was back in favor, and within two years was the world's highest paid actor.
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.