The screenplay by Vincent Lawrence and Sylvia Thalberg was based on the story "Honor Bright" by Jack Kirkland and Melville Baker.

[1] The film stars Gary Cooper, Carole Lombard, and Shirley Temple in a story about a small-time swindler going straight for his child's sake.

Jerry hatches a scheme to swindle other guests to get money to pay his hotel bill and the two escape to the next leg of their foreign vacation.

After selling a nonexistent gold mine to Felix Evans, a man who turns out to be much more versed in the art of swindling than he, Jerry decides to re-enter the workforce as a real estate salesman, but is not very successful.

During the making of the movie, Dorothy Dell, who co-starred with Temple in Little Miss Marker and developed a close personal friendship with her, died in an automobile accident.

[3] In the film Temple sings "The World Owes Me a Living",[4] a version of which also featured in a Silly Symphonies animation of The Ant and the Grasshopper[5] in the same year.

Hathaway had directed Shirley Temple before, in To the Last Man (1933) starring Randolph Scott and Esther Ralston and released the previous year.

[8] In her 2015 book Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood, Kristen Hatch casts the entire screenplay as a commentary on the tension between the grown-up, capitalist marketplace and the unburdened fantasy life of childhood.

The character of Jerry is locked in childhood and imagination, unable to hold down a real job and constantly reverting to carefree and irresponsible fun and games.

His daughter Pennie , as a child who is removed from the "cynical and rational world of the capitalist marketplace", is the perfect person to save him, but she is in danger of losing her own innocence by being paired with a criminal father.

Hatch also notes the constant references to money (including the child's name, Pennie), bills, and checks, reinforcing the theme of the capitalist marketplace.