At about 6½ minutes, the police department uses IBM punch cards and a sorting machine to search a database. This may be the first display of that technology in film.
Michael Curtiz was originally set to direct with Bette Davis, Glenda Farrell and George E. Stone starring.
In the opening scenes, fingerprints are being rolled onto a fingerprint card and the card then removed. That is wrong in that the prints were rolled properly but prints were left off. On the bottom of the card on the right, flats are taken of the right fingers and the flat of the thumb is taken. The same is done for the left four and the thumb. This card would have been rejected as being incomplete. Three cards are usually done. One for the city police records, one for the state, and one for the FBI records.
No women appear until over 15 minutes into the movie.