Pola Negri (Madame Habib) had been retired for about twenty years when Producer Walt Disney convinced her to come out of retirement to make this movie. Studio Executive and co-Producer Bill Anderson telephoned Negri at home in Texas, and convinced the veteran actress to read the screenplay, after going to Hollywood to negotiate the project.
Despite good reviews, and Hayley Mills' popularity with young audiences at the time, this movie failed at the box-office. Rather than being re-issued in theaters, it was initially shown two years later, in three parts, on the Disney Sunday night television show.
By the time she made this movie, Hayley Mills was seventeen-years-old, with a young woman's figure. However, she later confessed she had thought that the pink outfit in which she spends much of the movie made her look like "a fat pig", and like many another self-conscious young girls, she developed an eating disorder. In her later movies, she is noticeably thin. Fortunately, when she was pregnant with her first child, she was able to right herself, and has been a strong advocate of healthy eating and living ever since.
Eli Wallach and Hayley Mills comprehensively discussed their work on this movie with Pola Negri (Madam Habib) in the documentary Life Is a Dream in Cinema: Pola Negri (2006).
At a cost of five million dollars, this movie, at the time, was one of Walt Disney Productions most expensive live-action movie productions.