Sir Alfred Hitchcock's original cameo was cut by order of the censors. He and his secretary played deaf pedestrians. When Hitchcock's character made an apparently indecent proposal to her in sign language, she slapped his face. A more conventional cameo in front of a drugstore was substituted.
The special effects crew took stills of the Statue of Liberty's upraised hand, her torch, and the ledge beneath it. These were re-created to scale on a Universal Pictures soundstage.
The set used as the ranch house of Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger) was used as the home of the Brenners for another Sir Alfred Hitchcock movie, The Birds (1963). It originally was a leftover set from a Deanna Durbin movie shot on the Universal backlot.
According to the Australian videocassette sleeve notes, this was Sir Alfred Hitchcock's first movie with an all-American cast.
The shot of the ship on its side toward the end was a shot of the ocean liner S.S. Normandie, which had caught fire and capsized at its pier in New York. The fire was an accident, not sabotage (a cutting torch set fire to some kapok life vests), though there were rumors of sabotage at the time.
Alfred Hitchcock: A man visiting the newsstand in front of the drug store where Barry Kane is taken upon arriving in New York City.