Anecdotes

Frank J. Collins based his protagonist on Manhattan defense attorney William Joseph Fallon, dubbed "The Great Mouthpiece" by the 1920's New York press, who had a short but spectacularly successful career before succumbing to the effects of his own dissoluteness at the age of 41.

He has been cited as one of the inspirations for the celebrity lawyer Billy Flynn in the popular musical Chicago. He is also portrayed for six episodes by David Aaron Baker in the HBO television series Boardwalk Empire (2010).

The Man Who Talked Too Much (1940) is the second of three films adapted from the 1929 play "The Mouthpiece" by Frank J. Collins, in which a former prosecutor, disillusioned by sending an innocent man to the electric chair, takes the saying "Better that a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer the death penalty" one step further by becoming a defense attorney for gangsters and adroitly tightrope walking legal ethics. The three filmed adaptations were the Warner Brothers' The Mouthpiece (1932), The Man Who Talked Too Much (1940) and Illegal (1955).

The death scene when the phone is ringing and the guards ignore it, is almost identical to the Boris Karloff movie, The Walking Dead (1936), complete with the lights dimming as the execution takes place.

George Reeves' role as the first hotel clerk was filmed but cut.

The script was unfinished at the start of production and was revised throughout.