Trivia

At its New York City premiere at the Winter Garden Theatre, some musical numbers were projected on a larger, wider screen by a system called Magnascope, which had been in occasional use since 1924.

Beatrice Lillie sued Warner Bros. for $50,000, claiming that her reputation had been ruined by appearing in La revue des revues (1929), saying that she came to Hollywood to appear in feature roles and all she had was two scenes, for which she was paid $15,000.

She also sued Warner Bros. claiming that her reputation had been damaged because her contract specified that her scenes could only be used in a feature and not excerpted for a short. According to the lawsuit, the scenes were cut from the film and turned into a short. The California District Court of Appeal ruled July 16, 1934, that a studio could do whatever it wanted with a picture it owned but that she could sue for breach of contract.

Warner Brothers announced in 1929 that it was going to film this entirely in Two-Strip Technicolor. The Technicolor company immediately said that not enough cameras were available for use, so two sequences, involving Winnie Lightner in part one and part two were shot in black and white; the rest of the film was shot in 2-strip Technicolor. In the mid-1950s, Warner Bros. printed a black and white copy from its Technicolor studio vault print for television use and later discarded the original. The surviving sound on film version reveals the left side has been cropped off to accommodate the sound track which was added to the original sound on disc version, but the image has not been correctly re-centered.

Two reels of color footage survive.

The film contains John Barrymore's only screen appearance as Richard III, one of his greatest stage successes. However, the excerpt is not from the play "Richard III," but from William Shakespeare's "Henry VI: Part III," a "prequel" to "Richard III" in which he also appears.