Anecdotes

This was the first collaboration of director Ernst Lubitsch with writers Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder. At their first production meeting, Lubitsch posed this question: "How do the boy and girl get together?". Wilder promptly suggested that the opening scene should be in the men's shop of a department store. "The boy is trying to buy a pajama," he extemporized, "but he sleeps only in the tops. He is thrifty so he insists on buying ONLY the tops. The clerk says he must buy the pants, too. It looks like a catastrophe. Then the girl comes into the shop and buys the pants because she sleeps only in the pants." Lubitsch and Brackett were enchanted with this idea. Months later, they discovered that Wilder himself was a pajama tops-only sleeper and had been contemplating this idea for months, waiting for a chance to use it in a comedy.

François Truffaut has said that Miriam Hopkins was slated to star as Nicole de Loiselle.

Based on a French play by Alfred Savoir that was translated into English by Charlton Andrews and produced on Broadway. The New York production opened on 9/19/1921 at the Ritz Theatre and ran for 155 performances. It has previously been produced as a silent film starring Gloria Swanson, La huitième femme de Barbe-Bleue (1923).

Ernst Lubitsch originally wanted Marion Davies for the part of Nicole, but she had retired from films by 1938.

One of over 700 Paramount productions, filmed between 1929-1949, that were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution; they have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since. Because of legal complications, this particular title was not included in the original television package and was not televised until many years later. It was released on DVD 11/23/2009 as one of the six titles in Universal's Claudette Colbert Collection and again on DVD 9/27/2013 as part of the Universal Vault Series. Since that time also has had occasional airings on Turner Classic Movies.