Peter Lorre was under contract to Columbia Pictures. He agreed to be loaned out to MGM for this film if Columbia would do a film version of Crime and Punishment with him in the role of Raskolnikov.
Peter Lorre's first American film.
Charles Chaplin called Lorre the screen's best actor after seeing his performance in "Mad Love."
A torn poster of this movie, with its Spanish translation "Las manos de Orlac", appears in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, as a symbol for the intricate novel's plot that subsumes as dissension between mind and body of its anti-hero protagonist.
Doctor Gogol's last lines change the hair color in, but otherwise quote, the 1836 Robert Browning poem 'Porphyria's Lover' which reads:
- ...I found
- A thing to do, and all her hair
- In one long yellow string I wound
- Three times her little throat around,
- And strangled her.
Easily recognized actors who are supposed to be in this movie according to studio records and/or casting call lists include Harold Huber, Isabel Jewell, George Davis, Billy Dooley and Leo White. However, they were not seen.
In the original script the little girl dies in surgery because Gogol is so distracted. In the finished film, his mental distraction causes him to leave the operation and it is successfully completed by Dr. Wong.
May Beatty's declaration about the wax figure, "It went for a little walk!" is a clear echo of a similar line from The Mummy, also written by John L. Balderston and directed by Karl Freund.
The close-ups of the wax statue are actually Frances Drake in makeup.
The Hays Office cautioned the studio about showing scenes of the dead, injured or dying after the train wreck. Some countries banned the film altogether, while others cut the scenes of torture, guillotining and strangulation.
The last directorial effort of famed cinematographer Karl Freund.
The line "Each man kills the thing he loves" comes from Oscar Wilde's poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol".
The original titles were to contain a spoken warning in a manner similar to Frankenstein also written by Balderston, but that was abandoned in favor of the more original idea of the titles on a window climaxed by a fist smashing it.