Special effects technician Edmund E. Fellegi was killed when he fell from a 40-foot catwalk while releasing balloons for the New Year's Eve party scenes.
David O. Selznick's experience of trying to have life-saving serum flown in for his critically ill brother was the basis for the flying sequences ending the movie.
The failure of the original copyright holder to renew the film's copyright resulted in it falling into public domain, meaning that virtually anyone could duplicate and sell a VHS/DVD copy of the film. Therefore, many of the versions of this film available on the market are either severely (and usually badly) edited and/or of extremely poor quality, having been duped from second- or third-generation (or more) copies of the film.
This film flopped at the box office, resulting in a loss for Selznick International Pictures of $292,000 ($5.1M in 2017) according to studio records.
The liner shown at the beginning of the film is the SS Normandie. There are more shots of her when John and Jane try to go on their honeymoon in Europe.