One of the earliest movies to openly and unflinchingly discuss Nazi labor, concentration, and death camps.
Winston Churchill showed this movie to officers and other guests on board the battleship Prince of Wales in August 1941 as the ship sped across the North Atlantic en route to Churchill's historic meeting with Franklin D. Roosevelt in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, culminating in the Atlantic Charter.
There is a callback to Le chevalier de Londres (1934) which also starred Leslie Howard. Instead of a portrait of King George VI, who was king in 1939, the ballroom of the British Embassy displays a copy of the famous portrait of King George IV, by Sir Thomas Lawrence. As Prince Regent, George IV was a character in the 1934 movie.
Professor Smith suggests several times, in various scenes, that the works of William Shakespeare were really written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, and hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain of England, This concept is known as "The Oxfordian Theory" of Shakespeare authorship, which proposes that de Vere wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to Shakespeare. Although this attribution has been rejected by nearly all academic Shakespeareans, popular interest in the Oxfordian theory persists, which has found its way into contemporary culture of the early 21st century, being featured in Anonymous (2011), in which de Vere was played by Rhys Ifans.
The statue known as Aphrodite Kallipygos (also known as the Callipygian Venus), has the literal meaning "Venus (or Aphrodite) of the beautiful buttocks," is an Ancient Roman marble statue, which is probably a copy of an even older Greek original, lost to the passages of time, probably made of bronze.