Wissenswertes

Marguerite Duras was reportedly very displeased with this film version of her book. One of the scriptwriters, Christopher Isherwood, in an interview several years later, dismissed her famous and acclaimed novel as "typical pretentious French woo-wah".

Tony Richardson's vociferous (and very personal) complaints about Ian Bannen and his behavior during the making of this movie were perhaps a revenge for remarks Bannen made at the time this movie first appeared, when he told an interviewer that the plot had never made sense, that there had been re-writes of the script almost every day up to the end of filming, and that these re-writes were usually presented to the cast members handwritten on toilet paper.

Vanessa Redgrave was married to Tony Richardson at the time they made this film together, but, during filming, he had an affair with her co-star Jeanne Moreau. Moreau was named as co-respondent in Redgrave's divorce from Richardson, which was finalized at the the time of the film's 1967 release.

This was clearly an attempt by Tony Richardson to make an English-language version of a French New Wave movie, utilizing the most famous actress of that movement, Jeanne Moreau, as his star. The film was based on a novel by Marguerite Duras, whose writing had inspired "Hiroshima Mon Amour"; the music was composed by Antoine Duhamel, who worked on many of Godard's films; Moreau sings a song in the film composed by "Bassiak", who had composed her famous song in "Jules Et Jim"; and the black-and-white photography is by Raoul Coutard, whose work with Godard, Truffaut and others had become legendary. The film proved, however, to be a critical disaster and almost immediately vanished from view. In the UK, it was released as the lower half of a double-bill with a dubbed version of "Un Homme Et Une Femme". It has only ever been seen once on British television, in 1976.

Tony Richardson claims in his memoirs that Hugh Griffith and Ian Bannen were drunk while filming. He also claimed that Orson Welles had been very difficult to work with. All three were in turn highly critical of him.