Anecdotes

Clark Gable felt that he was too old for the part but wanted to make the film because it reflected his own right-wing, anti-communist views.

The movie was deliberately filmed at the end of 1954 because Clark Gable had also signed to star in Les implacables (1955) and wanted to avoid a huge tax bill in 1955.

Film debut of James Hong.

Susan Hayward had hoped to be able to take her twins sons along with her for the location shoot in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, she was in the middle of a very unpleasant divorce from Jess Barker at the time; citing concerns for his sons' health, he refused to give permission for them to leave the country. Under those circumstances, Hayward declined to go on location: her scenes were all filmed at the Fox studio.

This was the seventh film telecast on "NBC Saturday Night at the Movies", the first television program to exclusively broadcast post-1948 theatrical films on US network television. This one was first telecast 4 November 1961, and like the opener of the series, How to Marry a Millionaire, and several others which followed, had been filmed in CinemaScope, at its original 2.55:1 ratio, and so had to be "formatted to fit your screen" i.e. shown pan/scan in the conventional 4:3 TV ratio, losing nearly half of the image in the process, and literally destroying the composition of each scene. But viewers didn't seem to mind. The idea proved so successful that NBC soon followed it up with another series with the identical format, "Monday Night at the Movies", and it wasn't long before the format was taken up by both CBS and ABC.