Three of the seven juvenile actors and actresses who play the Hook children, Margaret Leclere (Elsa), Pamela Franklin (Diana), and Phoebe Nicholls (Gerty), went on to further success and developed enduring movie and television careers as adults. Mark Lester also had later successes, most famously in the title role in Oliver! (1968). He gave up acting in the early 1980s and became an osteopath.
Regarded as a disappointment by many critics, this film was very little-seen in the 1960s, and has only very occasionally appeared on British television in more than fifty years since. However, the Italian director Luchino Visconti was a great admirer of it.
The prayer that Diana (Pamela Franklin) recites when her mother dies comes from the Song of Solomon 3:4. The verse concludes with the sentence, "I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him to my mother's house, to the chamber of the one who conceived me." That passage also is the source of the film's title.
Dirk Bogarde, who plays "Charlie Hook," their absentee father, does not appear until halfway into the movie.
All of the old mansions on Chichester Road where this was filmed have been torn down and replaced with unremarkable multifamily homes.