Cinematographer Hal Mohr, who had previously photographed Marlene Dietrich in Partita d'azzardo (1939), attempted to resign from the film because of 50-year-old Dietrich's insistence that he use lighting to make her look much younger than she actually was, and Mohr didn't think it was possible.
The ballad "The Legend of Chuck-a-Luck" is heard during the opening credits and throughout the film, using the lyrics as narration. According to the American Film Institute, this is the first American film to use a song in this manner, along with Mezzogiorno di fuoco (1952), which was released the same year.
Director Fritz Lang had originally planned to call this film "Chuck-a-Luck". However, studio head Howard Hughes insisted that its name be changed to "Rancho Notorious", and when Lang asked why, he was told that it was because non-Americans (Europeans) wouldn't understand what "Chuck-a-Luck" (a gambling game commonly played in saloons in the Southwest) meant. Lang replied, "Well, it's a good thing that they all know what 'Rancho Notorious' (which has nothing to do with anything in the film) means!"
At the time she made this, Marlene Dietrich was considered one of Hollywood's most glamorous leading ladies, and strove to retain that reputation by learning every "trick of the trade" from her mentor Joseph von Sternberg about how to light and film her face flatteringly. But von Sternberg was a master of black-and-white cinematography and this film was made in Technicolor, the demands, techniques and standards for which were entirely different. So when Dietrich repeatedly tried to tell director Fritz Lang and this film's director of photography how to better light and shoot her, Dietrich's suggestions were politely ignored. The tension this created on the set increased as production progressed, and eventually reached the point where Lang and Dietrich refused to even speak to one another by the final week of filming.