Final film appearance of both Billie Burke and Charles Coburn who appear together in the same sequence.
Due to the failure of this film, Cantinflas never worked in Hollywood again. Some of his friends claimed that he got angry every time someone mentioned this movie to him.
Jack Lemmon's cameo appearance in his Con faldas y a lo loco (1959) drag is the only footage known to exist that captures Orry-Kelly's Academy Award-winning costumes and Lemmon's female makeup in Technicolor. Billy Wilder filmed "Some Like It Hot" in black-and-white because he felt that the makeup used for Lemmon and Tony Curtis was less believable in color.
Despite its cult classic status as one of Hollywood's most legendary flops, Pepe (1960) has never been released in the United States on home video in any format.
Pepe (1960) premiered in Hollywood on December 27, 1960. The Columbia Pictures feature, starring the Mexican film star Mario Moreno, Cantinflas, in the title role, was directed by George Sidney. A multitude of cameo appearances attempted to replicate the success of Mario Moreno's American debut, notably, La vuelta al mundo en ochenta días (1956), produced in 1956 by Mike Todd. The hilltop swimming pool sequence was filmed on property owned by Brian Aherne and Joan Fontaine. The Eastern property point overlooking Hollywood, downtown Los Angeles, and the panorama to the West, was located at the end of North Crescent Heights Boulevard, adjacent Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard and Laurel Canyon. Columbia Studios' "Pepe" art director Ted Haworth selected the location for the swimming pool scene-encounter. The studio built a full size swimming pool, on the bluff overlooking Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard. The entire set was fabricated on the bluff for this scene, with the four columned two-story (Aherne-Fontaine) mansion as the backdrop for reverse camera angle shots. Upon completion of filming, everything built for the setting was removed, with the property restored back to the original condition. During the mid 1960s, after Aherne and Fontaine's divorce in 1959, the mansion hill-top was sold, abandoned, becoming a Sunset Strip hippie enclave fort; the mansion was demolished in the late 1960s; Great Western, sub-dividing the hill-top, developed home sights selling for approximately $350,000 to $500,000 in the late 1970s.