[It] was one of the great detective stories of all time. The only trouble was we had Raymond Griffith as the star and he talked like this [in a hoarse whisper due to damaged vocal chords]. We had it all written for dialog because I thought it would be cute to have him say, “Now I want you to do this…”
The day we started shooting, they said, “It’s got to be a silent picture. We can’t have him talking like this.” The picture never showed anywhere. We turned it into a gag comedy.
Howard Hawks, from Joseph McBride, Hawks on Hawks, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992

It’s a detective film that revolves around an investigation of the detective Philip Trent. The film was shot as a silent picture because they did not get the rights for making a sound version and it was never distributed by Fox: the American market in 1929 demanded sound movies, and the film was not distributed as normal except for in England.
Jean A. Gili, Howard Hawks, Cinéma d’aujourd’hui – Seghers, Paris, 1971