According to various news items and information in the Twentieth Century-Fox Records of the Legal Department at the UCLA Arts--Special Collections Library, Twentieth Century-Fox purchased the motion picture rights to Lesser Samuels' original story in Jan 1949 and signed him to a ten-week contract to write the screenplay. Paramount, Universal, Warner Bros. and Columbia also had bid for the rights. Samuels, in a NYT article dated 30 Jul 1950, stated that he originally wanted to write about "the cancerous results of hatred," but did not intend to focus on an African-American doctor until he learned from colleagues of his daughter's fiancé, a doctor, about the problems faced by African-Americans doctors. According to correspondence in the Twentieth Century-Fox Produced Scripts Collection, a number of Fox producers who examined the story before the purchase were enthusiastic about it and wanted to produce it, including Otto Preminger, Sol Siegel and Nunnally Johnson. Johnson called the story, "the most reasonable approach to the racial question in a dramatic form that I have seen. It argues for professional fairness and equality, not for social reasons but for purely practical purposes." According to a 29 Dec 1948 memo, Fox public relations counsel Jason Joy was concerned about "the violence which this story contains and the fear that might be raised in some quarters that it might touch off violence in their sections of the country." After the purchase of Samuels' story, writer Philip Yordan made a number of suggestions that were incorporated into the final film. He advised going "into Luther's home. We will see real Negroes and how they live, as human beings. He will have a real brother, a real sister, a real father and mother--all human beings." In a later memo, studio production head Darryl F. Zanuck stated that the film was to "conscientiously avoid propaganda, but at the same time the final result of our efforts should be a picture which is actually powerful propaganda against intolerance." Zanuck, like Joy, worried about the violence in the story and warned, "even in certain so-called white cities, such as Detroit, Omaha, St. Louis and Philadelphia, we are apt to have the picture banned totally by the Police Commission. We already know that we will lose about 3,000 accounts in the South who will not play the picture under any circumstances. But it would be a terrible thing if we have something in the picture which would give the so-called white cities a chance to turn us down because then the picture will be a fatal financial disaster." Although, in Feb 1949, Zanuck liked the ending of the current script, in which "Luther" was killed, he changed his mind by Apr 1949 and wrote in a conference note that the ending left a "feeling of utter futility. Luther, a wonderful character, is hideously slaughtered. If his death resulted in something, if something were accomplished either characterwise or otherwise, it would be different and I would accept it." Joseph Mankiewicz prepared a preliminary script in Jun 1949, with a new story line and new characterizations, which Zanuck approved in Aug 1949.
       A 17 Oct 1949 LADN article asserted that the picture, which was about to start shooting, "will differ from its predecessors in that it will consider Negroes as everyday citizens in a big American city. Previous pictures have dealt with less representative phases of Negro life." In the article, Mankiewicz stated, "we are dealing with the absolute blood and guts, the bread and potatoes, so to speak, of Negro hating. Darryl F. Zanuck decided to produce this picture because, as he said, 'We want to tell a story of the Negro in a white man's everyday world, rather than the Negro in the Negro's world.' We are going to show the kind of hate the Negro runs up against in his daily life, how he is afraid to walk on certain streets." Studio press material noted that the studio delayed the film so that it would be released a year after Pinky (see below) in order to achieve "a gradual build-up to audience receptivity."
       No Way Out marked the feature film debut of Sidney Poitier, who, according to studio publicity, had earlier appeared in three Signal Corps short films. The picture also marked the screen debut of Ossie Davis (1917--2005), and was the first film in which Davis appeared with his wife, Ruby Dee. The couple appeared together in numerous films, plays and television programs before his death in 2005. Stephen McNally was borrowed from Universal for the production, for which technical director Valentine A. Becker, a California State Rehabilitation Officer for the Deaf, taught sign language to Linda Darnell, Richard Widmark and Harry Bellaver. "Alderman Mathew Tompkins," the character portrayed by Bill Walker, is referred to twice in the film, but was not seen in the print viewed.
       According to a 23 Aug 1950 DV news item, the National League of Decency condemned the film. In Chicago, on 22 Aug 1950, police captain Harry Fullmer held up a permit for exhibition of the film in the city and recommended banning the film to police commissioner John Prendergast because it "might cause more racial unrest than we have now," according to a 24 Aug 1950 HCN article. On the day of Fullmer's action, Walter White, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, sent a telegram to Chicago Mayor Martin D. Kennelly objecting to the ban, according to information in the NAACP Papers at the Library of Congress. White wrote, "This picture is the most forthright and courageous picturization of the evil of race prejudice which has yet been made....No Way Out exposes the evil nature of [racial prejudice] and instead of inciting to riot as police censor claims [it] will do enormous good in the exactly opposite direction." After Commissioner Prendergast approved the ban, the Chicago Sun-Times published an editorial on 28 Aug 1950 sharply criticizing the censors. Mankiewicz, who called the ban "absurd," was quoted by Life as saying, "I find it highly commendable for the city fathers to be keeping Chicago, with its high cultural standards, isolated from any violence." The mayor convened a special committee of the Cook County Crime Prevention Bureau, and after a screening on 30 Aug, they recommended to the mayor that the ban be rescinded, according to news items. Mayor Kennelly lifted the ban after three to four minutes of the film were cut, including scenes of blacks and whites preparing for the riot.
       In Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, the film was shown in a cut version, and the film was prohibited from being shown on Sundays in Massachusetts. At the time of the Chicago ban, an official of Fox's sales department stated that no attempt had been made to release the film in the South. After the Maryland State Board of Motion Picture Censors deleted scenes of blacks preparing to defend themselves before the riot and a subsequent scene showing the victory of the blacks, the NAACP branches in Baltimore and Maryland complained that the film's "original message is hopelessly lost." Walter White and officers of the local branches wrote to the board urging that the film be restored to its uncut state, or, barring that, for the board to delete scenes of racial epithets, but the board refused to change its decision. In explaining the refusal to White, board chairman Sidney Traub noted that the board and local police departments found the actions of the blacks during the riot scenes to be "highly provocative and crime inciting."
       According to information in the MPAA/PCA Collection at the AMPAS Library, at a meeting in mid-Oct 1950, the board of directors of the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association adopted a resolution to protest "the use of epithets in all motion pictures and particularly the excessive employment of these epithets in the motion picture, No Way Out.... Its authors err in their belief that in order to make the villain thoroughly contemptible, he and others, on thirty-five different occasions utter indecent epithets applied to the colored race. Some of these terms of opprobrium have never been heard or used by millions of Americans of both races. Their employment in the motion picture screens throughout the country builds up a vocabulary of undesirable expressions which should not be spoken in decent society." The resolution was sent to the PCA, which responded, "The company which produced it has stated, quite frankly, that they deliberately sought to be as forceful and dramatic as possible for the sake of the Negro, having no thought to hurt him, but, rather, to help him."
       Reviews were mixed concerning the film. MPH commented, "The screen has tackled the problem of race prejudice in various ways ever since Hollywood acquired a social conscience, but rarely has it come to grips with the whole tragic question quite so dramatically and forcefully as in this picture." The reviewer stated that the film "makes its point without flinching and with little regard for the feelings of the white audience." DV, however called it "tedious with words" and Fortnight was critical of the film's "lack of genuine feeling and insight into the motives of the very people it pretends to champion." SatRev reviewer Hollis Alpert's comment that "at some points this movie made me uncomfortable," provoked an angry letter from Walter White, who questioned, "I wonder what would have happened to [Alpert's] stomach had he been with me when I investigated a lynching in Georgia some years ago of an eight-months-pregnant Negro mother who had committed the crime of crying out in her grief that her recently lynched husband was innocent? Or if he had been with me in Detroit as policemen directed Negroes into the hands of mobs who slew their victims with incredible bestiality?" Alpert responded that he and White stood for the same things, but that Hollywood is "ducking its responsibility when it insists upon casting its problem films in sheerly melodramatic terms."
       The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing (Story and Screenplay: Mankiewicz and Samuels). New York foreign language press film critics gave Zanuck a special award for "great timeliness and unusual entertainment value which makes a major contribution to the advancement of improved race relations in the United States."