Trivia

In 1929, Lina Basquette received a fan letter from Austria in connection with the film. The sender said she was his favorite American actress. It meant nothing to Basquette at the time, but the sender of the letter was Adolf Hitler.

According to journalist Dorothy Donnell, director Cecil B. DeMille spent eight months and $200,000 on research before the production began. This included the enrolling of a young male informant into a boy's reform school and a female informant into a girl's school. Two large scrapbooks were kept in DeMille's archive, containing sworn testimonials by many former inmates, with graphic descriptions of the brutalities they endured. Donnell later said, "I have seen these books, and read in them things so revolting that they will probably never be printed."

During the filming of the fiery climax, Lina Basquette was actually burned rather badly. Her eyebrows, singed off by the heat, never grew back properly, according to her.

Tom Keene could not be doubled for a scene where he is sprayed with a fire hose, and the sequence was exhausting to shoot. Co-star Eddie Quillan was also injured in that scene, when he was pushed into a pool of water. Electric cables had been left lying in the water, and Quillan received such a violent shock that it bounced him right back up out of the water.

For the fire scene, dozens of female extras playing inmates had to shimmy down the two-story exterior set of the reformatory. The set would be on fire and it was only a matter of time before the whole thing was consumed by flames. According to a cameraman, at least three young women did not leave the roof fast enough, and were badly burned.