Gangster films had been going full-swing for two years, over at Warner Bros’, thanks to Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, so this was Howard Hughes’ attempt to cash in on the genre:

‘It is no secret that Hughes, fearing he had come upon the scene too late, developed a well-publicised battle with the censors for over a year so that when the film was eventually released the world had its tongue hanging out to see it.’

Hughes instructed his writer Ben Hecht to imagine it as ‘the Borgias set down in Chicago.’