In his Chicago Sun-Times review, Roger Ebert wrote that the character of Daxiat, the collaborationist critic, "is such an evil monster that he must surely be inspired by someone Truffaut knows." Michel Daxiat was the pseudonym of the critic Alain Laubreaux (1899-1968), who wrote for the anti-Semitic journal "Je suis partout." The scene where Bernard gives him a beating is inspired by an incident when Jean Marais punched Laubreaux; after Liberation, Laubreaux shared the fate Daxiat suffers at the film's end.
When Lucas talks to Marion about a play he saw in London, he is alluding to Patrick Hamilton's "Gaslight," which was twice made into a movie, by Thorold Dickinson in 1940, and by George Cukor in 1944.
The Last Metro won ten Césars (the French Oscars®) including best film, director, screenplay, actor and actress. Holds the record for most César awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) for a single film. It's tied with Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) for this honor, another film starring Gérard Depardieu. It was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Academy Award, but lost to Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1980), and also nominated for a Golden Globe Awards.
Filmmaker François Truffaut envisioned the film as being the second part in a thematic trilogy on the entertainment world, following La nuit américaine (1973), which focused on film. The script for the third film, "L'Agence Magique" (The Magical Agency), was written and focused on music halls, but the film was never made.
The film underwent a 2K restoration (from a 4K scan of the original negative) in 2014 by MK2 and the French Cinémathèque through the Digimage labs under the supervision of Guillaume Schiffman and Eric Vallée. The restored film premiered at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.