Barbara Mullen (Ellen Kirby) was playing a forty-year-old spinster, yet, she was only twenty-eight.
The play was first produced in the fall of 1939 by Harold Clurman's Group Theater, in Baltimore and then in New York City, with Elia Kazan as director, before it went on to being presented in London.
Finlay Currie famously played Magwitch in "Great Expectations" (1946). James Mason played this character in the 1974 TV remake.
The film was given a "B" rating by the National Legion of Decency - morally objectionable in part for all - the sympathetic delineation of one of the characters and her identification as an apostle of social progress lend authority and acceptability to her indictment of a large family. Observation: A minister of religion is depicted as opposed to scientific progress. In the film's presentation of its message of courage and optimism, there are traces of deism and naturalism whereby the impressions are gathered that God is a being far from this struggling world, and that man by himself can make the better world of the future.