Trivia

Nunnally Johnson originally offered the role played by Ginger Rogers to Tallulah Bankhead, who called the writer-producer and, in a 25-minute phone conversation, gave him her reasons for rejecting the role. Rogers turned the part down as well, but had a change of heart after Johnson sent her a letter asking her to reconsider, on the proviso that she could take the relatively minor role and make it into a star-turn.

The main poster image (also the Fox Film Noir DVD cover) shows the title character as a blonde with long yellow hair, which is completely misleading since Peggy Ann Garner has short blond hair.

Second of two consecutive years (the first was in La eva eterna (1953)) in which Ginger Rogers plays an aging Broadway diva on film.

Peter mentions that he went to see "The Girl in the Window" at a third-run theater when Detective Bruce asked him where he had been. Nunnally Johnson wrote and produced the film La mujer del cuadro (1944).

Maggie McNamara was originally cast as Nancy Ordway but she fell ill shortly before filming. Fox cameraman Charles G. Clarke, in town filming backgrounds, ran into Peggy Ann Garner at the St. Moritz Hotel and suggested her to Nunnally Johnson. As Garner told it to columnist Ed Sullivan, "Two nights later, the doorbell of the apartment rang. Nunnally Johnson was standing there with another man. 'What clothes have you got here?' asked Nunnally and went past me to the closet. 'These will do,' he said, indicating three dresses. The man with him took them off the hangers and started out the door. I thought it was a Hollywood gag - and not very funny. 'No, it's on the level,' said Nunnally. 'Maggie McNamara has taken ill, and we're going to test you for her part. The makeup man will be here at 6 a.m., so you'd better get a good nights sleep. The hairdresser will be here around midnight.' As Nunnally was exiting, I asked him how in the world he'd thought of me. 'I didn't,' he confessed, 'but the minute Maggie got sick, Charlie Clarke started bending my ear about you. And the more I thought about, the more sense it made.'" In a 1969 oral history interview with Johnson, he revealed his true feelings about casting Garner in the part with these ungallant comments. "Peggy Ann Garner I'd known because she was in Abandonados (1942). She was a tiresome little girl. Tiresome woman." Johnson added that he felt Garner "was pretending she was practically slumming. I think she'd played on a couple of plays on Broadway and, she was rather aloof to the Hollywood contingent. I knew her, and I knew her mother, who had brought her around for 'Pied Piper.' Kinda trashy people, and she just irked me somehow. I couldn't stand her."