Despite being billed seventh in the cast, Clark Gable has more screen time than this implies, and much greater impact. During the filming, Irving Thalberg had scenes added to bolster Gable's part. The result was a screen presence three times longer than that called for in the original script. He was given an MGM contract after shooting was completed.
Marks Jean Harlow's first teaming with Clark Gable, who proved such an ideal screen partner that the pair went on to costar in five more movies: Red Dust (1932), Hold Your Man (1933), China Seas (1935)), Wife vs. Secretary (1936) and Saratoga (1937).
In 1931, MGM had noticed how much money Warner Brothers had raked in with The Public Enemy (1931) and Little Caesar (1931), MGM production chief Irving Thalberg commissioned writer Frances Marion to come up with MGM's first real "talking" gangster picture.
Ralph Bellamy's first screen role and feature-film debut in what became a six-decade career of over one hundred films. While he never became a major star or played many leads in "A" pictures, he made a career out of playing second-leads in major productions before developing into a character actor.
'The Secret Six' was a name coined by Chicago Tribune reporter James Doherty to six influential Chicago businessmen (including the president of Sears-Roebuck) who organized the business community in the 1930's against Al Capone and were instrumental in obtaining his conviction on tax evasion. They appear in two scenes as a force that, thanks to information passed along to them via Carl, will finally be able to take down Scorpio.