The 10 November 1916 Variety and 25 November 1916 Motion Picture News announced that Harry Rapf, president of the new Robert Warwick Film Corp., arranged with Broadway theatrical managers Klaw & Erlanger to purchase the film rights to the play The Argyle Case for the company's first production. Portraying detective "Asche Kayton," "Warwick will be called upon to perform many feats of daring and physical strength of the sort that has made Douglas Fairbanks such a successful fim star, as well as to display an uncanny cleverness in outwitting the most skillful band of counterfeiters in America." The 17 November 1916 Variety noted that the production had already begun "this week."
       According to the 30 December 1916 Motography, "This is the play on which the internationally famous detective William J. Burns collaborated with Harvey J. O'Higgins and Harriet Ford, and which was presented with tremendous success on the stage a few seasons ago with Robert Hilliard as the star. Mr. Warwick is rapidly completing the picturized version of this play at the Selznick studios in New York under the direction of Ralph W. Ince. By way of making sure of correct details, Mr. Ince has enlisted the services of Detective Burns, who is supervising many of the scenes in which such modern instruments of scientific detection as the dictograph and fingerprints processes are used." The Selznick studios had previously been the Biograph studios, located at 796 East 176th Street in the Bronx, New York.
       The dictograph, "or detectophone, is the phonodict, an instrument so highly developed and sensitized that the listener at the other end of the wire can hear the slightest whisper in the room where it has been installed," according to an item in the 17 February 1917 Motography. It was an antecedent of the modern microphone. The following week's Motography elaborated on the forensic science employed in the film: "Burns was the first to use the dictograph to obtain evidence from the criminals themselves direct. He [also] invented the 'prepared blotter' by means of which finger prints could be obtained without arousing the suspicions of the subject. With a trick pen, the fingers of the subject are smeared with ink, and in a moment the evidence of identity is recorded. Both of these important devices of the modern detective are employed in The Argyle Case exactly as Detective Burns has used them in many of his big cases."
       The 3 February 1917 Motion Picture News reported that Ince had "finished the work of cutting and assembling the film last week and a private showing was held for Lewis J. Selznick and his associates."
       Reviewer Edward Weitzel, in the 24 February 1917 Moving Picture World, wrote, "The version is in seven reels [other sources cited five or six], and Director Ralph Ince has speeded up the action and cut the story down to the essentials so cleverly that the seven reels seem no more than five. Wisely eliminating all the comic relief furnished by the colored auntie in the spoken drama, Frederick Chapin, who made the scenario, confined himself to the clearing up of the mysterious murder that forms the subject of the play. The combined efforts of the director and the scenarist have resulted in an intense, firmly woven melodrama that never insults one's intelligence by the impossibility of its plot nor the miraculous skill of its detective hero."
       Wid's, like other reviewers, enjoyed the film's fast pace, but criticized the overuse of studio sets for exterior scenes, saying, "[M]ost any ordinary fan will realize that he is looking at a set, and not at the real thing. This was particularly true of the house-top set, which had a bad cloud backing with a moon in it."
       The Variety review cited a length of 6,500 feet, and Wid's timed the film at 75 minutes. Along with the trade magazines' varying number of reels, release dates also conflicted, some at 15 January 1917, others in February 1917. An item in the 3 March 1917 Motography mentioned that the film was adapted not from the Ford-O'Higgins play but rather from novelist E. Phillips Oppenheim's The Court of St. Simon. That was an error. Oppenheim's novel was the basis of Warwick's follow-up film, The Silent Master (1917, see entry).
       An item in the 11 February 1916 Variety had noted that the Pluragraph Co. was starting work on The Argyle Case, but nothing more was heard of this production.
       Another adaptation of the Ford-O'Higgins play was released in 1929 by Warner Bros. That version was directed by Howard Bretherton and starred Thomas Meighan and H. B. Warner (see entry).
       The National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) included this film on its list of Lost U.S. Silent Feature Films as of February 2021.