Warner Baxter had won the second ever Best Actor Academy Award playing the Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona (1928), the first all-talking western. He would play the role again in The Return of the Cisco Kid (1939), and a variation of it in The Arizona Kid (1930).
On August 5 1931, around 40 members of the cast and crew were travelling to a location in Tucson when their Southern Pacific Argonaut train derailed east of Yuma. They were largely uninjured, but two trainmen were killed.