Originally, Patricia Morison played Victor Mature's wife, who is attacked and raped by a gangster who is supposed to be watching out for her while Mature is in prison. Afterwards, she commits suicide by sticking her head in the kitchen oven and turning on the gas. Both scenes were cut from the original print at the insistence of the censors, who wanted no depiction of either a rape or a suicide, so she does not appear in the film at all. Mention is made later in the film about Mature's wife's suicide and an obscure reference is made by Nettie that the unseen gangster Rizzo contributed to the wife's downfall.
Henry Hathaway wasn't happy with the choice of Richard Widmark as the villain and wanted him removed from the picture. When Darryl F. Zanuck overruled him, he tried to make the shoot as uncomfortable for Widmark as possible. Widmark decided this wasn't for him and decided to quit one lunchtime. Hathaway persuaded him to stay and they completed the movie with a new respect for each other. They would go on to make another five movies together and Widmark was a pallbearer at Hathaway's funeral.
Because this was filmed on actual locations, a toilet is visible in Victor Mature's jail cell. The sight of toilets was generally banned in films until Alfred Hitchcock managed to break the taboo with Psycho (1960).
When New York mobster Joe Gallo--a vicious killer known as "Crazy Joe"--was starting out as a small-time hoodlum, he saw this movie and instantly idolized Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark). Afterwards, Gallo began wearing his suits with black shirts and white ties in emulation of Udo. He also began acting in a more crazed manner, thus giving rise to his "Crazy Joe" persona, which lasted until the gangster's death on 7 April1972, when he was murdered by rival gangsters in Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy.