Johnny helps transform the dive into a first-class nightclub called the Silver Slipper that attracts an upscale crowd, and Charlie makes him a partner to reward him for his efforts.

Johnny returns to Los Angeles and proposes to Dale, who contemptuously rejects him, citing the dramatic differences in their ethnic and economic backgrounds, then is hit and killed by a car trying to get away from him.

[2] Leading man Paul Muni wanted either Carole Lombard or Lupe Vélez as his co-star, but after hearing the positive feedback his contract player Bette Davis was receiving for her performance in Of Human Bondage, which was in production at RKO, studio head Jack L. Warner decided to cast her in the role of Marie Roark.

Director Archie Mayo expected Davis to deliver a histrionic performance, but the actress, whose own sister suffered from a mental disorder, insisted a subtle portrayal of the breakdown w as more appropriate and accurate.

Andre Sennwald of The New York Times called the film "a raw and biting melodrama dealing with the bitterly realistic emotions" that permits Paul Muni "to scrape the nerves in the kind of taut and snarling role at which he is so consummately satisfying" and to display "his great talent for conviction and theatrical honesty."

While he thought Johnny's "feeble confessional at the conclusion of Bordertown is an unconvincing and inconsistent denouement for the career of such a vigorous rebel against the established order", he felt the film "otherwise manages to impale the spectator's attention before the picturesque and somewhat hysterical materials of the story.