Ray Milland was seriously injured while making this film. Playing a cavalry officer, he was leading a charge through a village. As they rounded a corner, he saw that someone had left a camera on a tripod in the middle of the street. There was no time to try to pull around it or stop his horse, and Milland, an experienced horseman, tried to get the horse to jump over it. The horse cleared the camera, but the straps that held the saddle onto the horse snapped. Milland was thrown from the saddle, bounced off the wall of a building and landed in a pile of debris and broken masonry. He was unconscious for almost 24 hours and was hospitalized for two weeks.
Three actresses were cast as Anna. The first, Marlene Dietrich, was constantly at loggerheads with then-director Henry Hathaway who he wanted to de-glamorize her. After some re-writing by Grover Jones, she finally quit, and production was frozen. Margaret Sullavan was then brought in as Anna and shooting resumed, but while clowning around with Ray Milland on the set between takes (she was squirting him with a concealed water pistol), she fell and fractured her arm. She refused to do the rest of the film in a sling as the studio heads demanded, and also quit. At this point, Dietrich offered to come back, but Paramount refused and instead brought in Italian sex symbol Isa Miranda. However, Miranda knew no English and had to have all her dialogue supplied phonetically.
One of over 700 Paramount Productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since; its earliest documented telecast took place in Seattle Friday 31 October 1958 on KIRO (Channel 7); it first aired in Omaha 23 June 1959 on KETV (Channel 7), in Boston 30 October 1959 on WBZ (Channel 4), and in Milwaukee 28 Deember 1959 on WITI (Channel 6).
The promotional artwork for this film (airbrushing at least) was done by Joseph Reilly an Irish Catholic commercial artist and father of Charles Nelson Reilly. His son CNR wore a t-shirt of the movies art on a 1977 episode of the Match Game on CBS where the following day he explained the shirt which he had found at a thrift shop.
In 1983's season 2 of Remington Steele, he has a poster of "Hotel Imperial" hanging in his apartment, just to the left of "Casablanca", "The Thin Man" and "Notorious".
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