Trivia

According to Producer and Director Otto Preminger, he had to work to win the respect of the cast, who all seemed "hostile" to him when he took over, with the exception of Clifton Webb. "I learned later", he said, "that Mamoulian had called each of them individually and warned them that I did not like their acting and intended to fire them." It was not true. Dame Judith Anderson decided to confront him on the set. She said that if he wasn't happy with her performance, then he should show her how to make it better.

Vincent Price always considered this to be the best movie he ever made.

Clifton Webb had to deal with the shock of seeing himself on-screen after a long absence from Hollywood. Watching the first batch of rushes that included his first scene in the tub when he meets McPherson, Webb nearly had a heart attack: "When I saw myself sitting in the bathtub looking very much like Mohandas K. Gandhi. I felt I might vomit. After it was over, Dana (Andrews) saved my life with a big swig of bourbon. The first shock of seeing myself had a strange effect on me, psychologically, as it made me realize for the first time that I was no longer a dashing young juvenile, which I must have fancied myself being through the years in the theatre."

Despite the Oscar snub of the score, David Raksin's music proved to be so popular that the studio soon found itself inundated with letters asking if there was a recording available of the main theme. Soon, sheet music and recordings of the instrumental music were released and proved to be a huge hit with the public.

Artist Azadia Newman, Rouben Mamoulian's wife, was commissioned to paint the portrait of Laura, with which Detective Lieutenant McPherson becomes entranced, but it was not used in the final movie. In his autobiography, Otto Preminger wrote, "When I scrapped Mamoulian's sets, the portrait of Laura went with them. Portraits rarely photograph well, so I devised a compromise. We had a photograph of Gene Tierney enlarged and smeared with oil paint to soften the outlines. It looked like a painting, but was unmistakably Gene Tierney."