Penicillin only recently had been introduced, proving to be a life-saving drug in WW2. In postwar Europe, the continent was still in shambles, with a huge black market for everyday necessities, including medicine. The noir classic The Third Man (1949) would further show the shadowy world of medical profiteering.
Filming was done on thirty blocks of London's East End waterfront district created by the art directors and set decorators on Universal-International Pictures' Sound Stage 21. This included wharves, cobblestone streets, old buildings exteriors, a court, a pool hall, two apartments, a train with passenger wagons and a prison with multiple rooms and cells, interchangeable through a monorail crane on rollers. One setting was used to arrange the opening twenty-nine block chase sequence. The film is set in London, England but was shot almost entirely at Universal-International Pictures' Sound Stage 21 from March to May 1948. Some exterior scenes were shot on location at Los Angeles's Griffith Park Zoo and Hollywood Park Racetrack.
Burt Lancaster's flogging ranks forty-third in the book, "Lash! The Hundred Great Scenes of Men Being Whipped in the Movies." Curiously, while he's sentenced to receive eighteen lashes, in the book on which this movie is based, his character is sentenced to receive only ten lashes. Burt Lancaster was known as an athletic performer and he wanted to perform the cat o'nine tails whipping scene in the movie as authentically as possible. He urged actor Harold Goodwin (playing the role of the whipper) "really lay it on him." A split leather belt replaced the actual leaded cat o' nine tails but, even so, the next day due to welts he was unable to wear a shirt.
Burt Lancaster was said to be the only American actor in the film, with an all-British expatriate co-starring, featuring and supporting cast.
The mattes in the opening credits depict several famous London scenes, including the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, Battersea Bridge and the statue of Boudicca as well as the busy docks of the old East End.