Of the many female film characters here, Jo Van Fleet as "Ma McDade" steals the show. She was the great stage actress who made her film career playing crusty older women in pictures like La valle dell'Eden (1955) and Fango sulle stelle (1960)-all the more amazing in that she was only 41 at the time, fifteen years younger than Clark Gable, and not that much older than the other actresses.
Clark Gable formed a production company with his Gli implacabili (1955) co-star Jane Russell and her husband Robert Waterfield in order to produce this film. However, the stress of producing took such a toll on the 55-year-old Gable's already guarded health that he never produced another movie.
According to an article in the 18 September 1956 edition of The Hollywood Reporter, director Raoul Walsh shot three different endings and planned to have preview audiences chose the one they liked for the film's general release.
Several sequences shot for the film never made it onto the screen. These included the return of the surviving son (John Compton, whose entire role ended on the cutting-room floor); a rain-drenched scene where Clark Gable and Eleanor Parker retrieve the stolen gold from a river; a romantic interlude with Parker apparently clad only in a striped blanket; and an alternate ending where Parker, now married to Gable, gives birth to his son.
By the mid-1950s, Eleanor Parker had co-starred with many of Hollywood's most famous leading men. She would recall, however, being especially excited at the prospect of acting in this film opposite Clark Gable: "I was a real fan." She plays a fiery redhead described by Gable as "tougher than Wang leather, smarter than spit, and colder than January."