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This movie was made as a Jayne Mansfield vehicle in hopes of replicating the box office success of the previous year's similar film Bus Stop (1956), which had starred Mansfield's main rival as a platinum blonde bombshell, Marilyn Monroe.

Locations for some of the rainy outside mountain pass scenes were filmed on Malibu Canyon Rd. The familiar tunnel pass can be seen about 32 mins in. Looks almost exactly the same in 2023.

Originally planned as a vehicle for Marlon Brando, to be directed by Henry Hathaway.

Indicative of 20th Century-Fox's appraisal of their two blonde bombshell stars' relative value as box office attractions, the studio made this and the previous year's "Bus Stop" back-to-back. Bus Stop (1956), starring Marilyn Monroe, had been budgeted at just under $3 million, was filmed in color, and went on to earn nearly $8 million in rentals. The Wayward Bus (1957), on the other hand, top-lined Marilyn wanna-be Jayne Mansfield, was budgeted at about $1.5 million, was filmed in black-and-white, and failed to gross even $2 million.

The John Steinbeck novel on which this is based was published in 1946, and during the decade between then and when this finally went into production, a long list of well-known names were attached at various times to play the central characters, including Susan Hayward, Marlon Brando, Jennifer Jones, Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Richard Widmark, and Joanne Woodward.