Clare Boothe Luce, then U.S. Ambassador to Italy, prevented the film from being shown at the Venice Film Festival; and a Senate committee had decided that the film would not have beneficial effects on contemporary youth. Both incidents only served to increase publicity and ticket sales for the controversial movie.
To the end of his life, Richard Kiley regularly received collections of old jazz records to make up for the ones his character lost in this picture.
This film launched the rock'n'roll era, especially in American movies, by using "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets as its theme. The song was chosen for the theme song after it was heard among records owned by Peter Ford, son of the film's star, Glenn Ford (a story that the producer's daughter had discovered the song is not true) "Rock Around the Clock" had been largely ignored until it was heard in the movie, after which it soon shot to #1 around the world, and eventually sold an estimated 25 million copies. In an embarrassing miscalculation, MGM could have owned the complete rights to the song, but it ignored writer/director Richard Brooks' advice to buy it outright; instead, the studio went penny-wise and pound-foolish and merely purchased, for only a few dollars, the film-use rights to the mega-hit song.