Nobody Lives Forever

When Nick leaves the hospital at the beginning of the film, the patch on his uniform's left shoulder indicates he was a member of the U.S. Army's First Infantry Division, nicknamed "The Big Red One". Later in the film Nick mentions seeing destroyed churches in Italy. The 1st Inf. Division saw action in Sicily, as well as North Africa, the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach, the Battle of the Bulge and through the heart of Germany, ending up in Czechoslovakia by the end of the war.

This film went before the cameras between September and November 1944 but remained on the shelf for two years before it was finally released in October 1946; therefore, it predates John Garfield's well-known performances in Pride of the Marines (1945) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), even though it was released afterwards.

The set for the house Nick Blake (John Garfield) rents in California is the same set, although partly rearranged, used for Christmas in Connecticut (1945) with Barbara Stanwyck and Dennis Morgan.

According to TCM's Eddie Muller, screenwriter W.R. Burnett was paid five times for this story. Warner Bros. initially paid him for an original screenplay in 1941. But, per his contract, Burnett took back the rights to his work when the film wasn't made within a specified amount of time. His work was the published in serial form in Collier's magazine in 1943, then published as a novel by Knopf that same year. Warner Bros. then paid him $20,000 for the film rights to his novel and paid him yet again to write the screenplay.

Humphrey Bogart refused the role of Nick Blake.