Rouben Mamoulian's mother Virginia Kalantarian made an appearance in a prison scene, behind the cage next to Anna Sten. She was an amateur actress in Tiflis, Georgia before immigrating to the United States.
Résurrection (1934) is an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's 1899 novel Resurrection (Voskraeseniye) published in Moscow, 1899). The screenplay was written by Maxwell Anderson with contributions from a number of writers, including Preston Sturges and Thornton Wilder. According to modern sources, Willard Mack contributed to the script.
There was one noticeable error in the finished film. Samuel Goldwyn loved the music Alfred Newman had used for a Russian Orthodox church service so much that when his production team realized the music had been played backwards nobody dared tell him. The film went out to theaters that way.
Producer Samuel Goldwyn made the film to showcase Ukrainian actress Anna Sten, his newest discovery. It was Goldwyn who named the film Résurrection (1934), on the theory that it meant the same thing as "Resurrection" and was easier to understand. The first film adaptation of the Tolstoy novel was made in 1909 by D.W. Griffith, Resurrection (1909), and ran 10 minutes. Numerous other film versions have been made since then.