Trivia

Deborah Kerr was initially scheduled to co-star with Gregory Peck. Then Lana Turner was slotted for the role, and then withdrawn from the production due to her extended European honeymoon with Henry J. Topping, Jr. Finally, Ava Gardner was cast in what turned out to be the first of three films to co-star the pair, along with The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) and On the Beach (1959).

The role of Armand de Glasse was first offered to Kirk Douglas, who turned it down in order to make the independent film Champion (1949), for which he was Oscar-nominated.

This film was a flop at the box office, resulting in a loss of $821,000 ($10.8M in 2024) for MGM according to studio records. It did not even cover its negative cost, let alone distribution and advertising expenses.

Presented with what he called an "enormous script," director Robert Siodmak's first cut had a running time of about three hours, which despite a lot of cutting, he felt was "still too long, terribly slow, heavy and dull with the disadvantage that now the story didn't even make sense." The film was cut down further to two hours and ten minutes, which didn't help and MGM requested that the film be reshot with "a new and stronger love story." Siodmak then was replaced with Mervyn LeRoy. Upon seeing the finished film, Siodmak felt like not a single scene of his remained. Nevertheless, he is the film's sole credited director while LeRoy was uncredited.

Melvyn Douglas' last film under contract to MGM. According to his autobiography, Douglas initially rejected this role, but eventually agreed to do it as a favor to MGM production head Dore Schary.