The film, based on the William Faulkner novels Sanctuary (1931) and Requiem for a Nun (1951), is about the black maid of a white woman who kills the latter's newborn in order to give her employer a way out of a predicament, and then faces the death penalty.

[2] In 1928, in the county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, Nancy Mannigoe, a 30-year-old black woman, is condemned to death for the willful murder of the infant son of her white employer Mrs. Gowan Stevens, the former Temple Drake.

[4] A car accident was used as a plot device for Temple to be discovered as, due to the absence of the aforementioned element,[5] Horace Benbow is not in this version and therefore cannot track her down.

[3] James Poe wrote the script,[11] using an outline and prologue made by Zanuck because the latter was unable to contact Faulkner through employees sent to visit the author.

[9] Crowther wrote that the film "no more reflects or comprehends the evil in the Faulkner stories or the social corruption suggested in them than did" the previous adaptation, and that Sanctuary was a "melodrama of the most mechanical and meretricious sort" that lacked the explanation for Temple's behavior.

[11] Degenfelder argued that the source material was poorly combined and adapted, with the work "woefully deficient in movement", resulting in "an artistic disaster".