The film screened out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987.
First English language film of the Italian Taviani Brothers directors - Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani.
Publicity for this picture promoted the film as "An American Fable".
The silent movie that D.W. Griffith saw that inspired his vision for Intoleranz (1916), the picture he was making, was Giovanni Pastrone's Italian silent epic Cabiria (1914).