After their collaboration on the 1944 Phantom Lady, producer Joan Harrison chose Thomas Job's stage play Uncle Harry as the next project with director Robert Siodmak.

[3] The screenplay which Harrison and Siodmak agreed on to produce contained a frame narrative which showed the conscience-stricken Harry, unable to cope with his guilt for going unpunished for his crime, at the town's station, waiting to be sent to a mental institution.

[4] This ending had been, with some reservations, classified as acceptable by censor Joseph Breen, contrary to the original play, as a delinquent protagonist not brought to justice would be rejected by the Production Code Association (PCA).

)[1] Prior to the film's scheduled August 1945 release, Universal studio's production manager Martin Murphy insisted on re-cuts and the adding of the "dream ending" to get the PCA's approval.

[4] In his autobiography, Siodmak claimed that after repeated test screenings, his original cut was reinstated, and that the dream ending, although a compromise invented to appease the censors, was his idea.

[4] In later years, The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry was also released in a heavily edited reissue version titled The Zero Murder Case.

[6] In his 1945 New York Times review, critic Bosley Crowther described the film as "a drab and monotonous succession of routine episodes" with a "script [that] is pictorially cut-and-dried."

Crowther also noted that "Siodmak's direction is curiously slow and stiff" and that "George Sanders is badly miscast as the murderous Milquetoast, giving neither an illusion of timidity nor the menace of ugly temperament.