Director Zoltan Korda's own remake of this film, Les 4 plumes blanches (1955), re-used a lot of the battle sequences from this movie, which did not lend themselves very well to the cropping necessary to achieve the width of the CinemaScope ratio, nor did their comparative fuzziness blend well with the new footage.
The action scenes, photographed by Osmond Borradaile, were not only filmed where the historical battles had taken place, but also included among the many extras, people who had witnessed or participated in the fighting more than forty years earlier. These battle scenes further benefitted from Director Zoltan Korda's expertise at large-scale action and his early experience as a cavalry officer.
The sailing ships pulled by hordes of Sudanese along the Nile were constructed specially for the production in exact period detail at great cost.
The Korda brothers (Alexander, Vincent, and Zoltan) had a working relationship and method that sometimes agitated their English cast and crew, who were not used to sudden, loud arguments conducted in Hungarian and halting English peppered with expletives. John Clements recalled sitting in Alexander's office discussing a point of production when suddenly the three brothers broke into a violent screaming match. "Zolly (Zoltan) started picking things up off the table and throwing them on the floor, and I really thought they were going to kill each other," Clements said. Just as suddenly as it began, however, the fight stopped "and everybody embraced, including me, and we all had a nice cup of tea, and that was that."
Producer Alexander Korda spared no expense in this production, shooting in Technicolor, and doing most of the exteriors on location in the Sudan.