Trivia

On 18 June 1962, while filming scenes in Kenya's bush country, Edward G. Robinson suffered a heart attack. After being rushed to the capital city of Nairobi where he spent several days, he was flown to London. Following several weeks of rest and medical supervision, he was released from hospital and was able to finish the film.

When the movie was released in the United States in 1965 (two years after its British release) its American distributors, Paramount, cut so much out of the film to enable it to fit on a double-bill, that the original score by Tristram Cary had to be removed and replaced with a new one by Les Baxter. Paramount also changed the title to "A Boy Ten Feet Tall".

The original cut of the film ran over three hours and was edited down to a more manageable 128 minutes before its premiere. Consequently, Marne Maitland's part of Hassan, the caretaker of the apartment block where Sammy lived and who was killed in the bombing raid along with Sammy's parents, was entirely cut from the film.

The British Board of Film Censors asked for certain scenes between Sammy and the Syrian peddler to be either cut or toned down. The producers were after a "U" certificate for the film and so had to comply. In the original full length version, the Syrian, who comes across Sammy laying on a sand dune in the middle of the Egyptian desert, is sexually attracted to Sammy and was shown lusting after him and trying to have his way with him. However, two small parts of the supposedly cut scenes did make it to the final release print. In one, the Syrian is kneeling before the standing Sammy and feeling the boy's right leg, while quite plainly and excitedly ogling the front of Sammy's khaki bush shorts, before grabbing hold of Sammy's right wrist and trying to drag the boy down onto the sand with him, while Sammy tries to wriggle free from his grasp. Originally released at 129 minutes (all but five seconds) the film, after its initial release in 1963, was, for some unknown reason, trimmed of ten minutes of footage and the original full length release version is now believed lost.

The Durban street scenes towards the end of the film may have been stock footage, but the Fairview Hotel, supposedly in Durban, was in Jinja, Uganda. The film unit did not shoot in Durban at all.