Norma Shearer played sexual desire as strong and natural in pre-Code Hollywood films, and here her character sees Clark Gable's character, a big-time gambler on trial for murder, for the first time in A Free Soul. She's the daughter of his lawyer, played by Lionel Barrymore (Academy Award for Best Actor, 1931-32), and although she's engaged to another man, her jaw drops when she sees her father's client for the first time. Shearer herself, according to Mick LaSalle, found Gable "beautiful from his head to his feet." (It is doubtful they had an affair; Shearer was married to MGM studio mogul Irving Thalberg, and LaSalle wrote that when the cameras stopped turning, she would "stop on a dime.... Reserved in real life, she used the screen to live out her fantasies.") Shearer's clothes were by Adrian; cinematography by William Daniels, directed by Clarence Brown, 1931.

The screenplay of A Free Soul was based on a novel by Adela Rogers St. John and reportedly also on a play, uncredited, by Williard Mack; adapted by Becky Gardiner and, reportedly the uncredited Philip Dunning, Dorothy Farnum, and John Lynch; music by William Axt, edited by Hugh Wynn, art direction by Cedric Gibbons.

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