Legs Diamond was a big hoax. In real life Diamond was a son of a bitch, probably the worst man who ever lived. As I progressed in my research I realized I couldn’t possibly make a film out of it, and I didn’t want to.
I’d seen the crowds of films like Scarface and I decided the public would be sick of all those mass killings and bursts of machine-gun fire.
So I decided to make a comedy out of it, a real comedy about Legs Diamond and Alice; I mean that inside a serious framework I adopted a comic style and a comic tone, treating tragic scenes in quite a light manner. – Budd Boetticher*