According to Wade Williams in Alice Faye: The Star Next Door (1996), when Alice Faye saw a rough cut of the film and realized that Otto Preminger's editing had diminished the impact of her performance in favor of newcomer Linda Darnell, she got up from the screening, drove off the 20th Century Fox lot, threw her dressing room key to the security guard and vowed never to work for the studio again.
Linda Darnell spent a week working as a waitress in the Fox studio commissary to prepare for her role.
Alice Faye read and rejected over thirty scripts before accepting this movie, which she hoped to be another Laura (1944). The actress' best scenes were cut and the film ended her long-term association with Fox.
Otto Preminger often liked to claim that he had a poor memory, particularly for the films he made as a contract director at Twentieth Century Fox, like this one. In the 1970s, he told interviewer Gerald Pratley that he had completely forgotten everything about this film, but had happened to catch a glimpse of it on television when he and his wife were dressing to go out for a social occasion. He said that he had found the film interesting, had been astonished to realize it was a film he had himself directed and had switched off the TV to go out well before the end, having no idea as to which of the characters had committed the murder in the film.
Otto Preminger's famous interest in the opening credits of his films precedes his long association with the legendary title designer Saul Bass, as this film shows. All the credits at the start of the film are written on road-signs passed by the bus on which the story begins, with the Dana Andrews character as a passenger. There is no credit for title design, nor is there on Preminger's subsequent pre-Bass movies - Whirlpool (1950) (where the credits are written on a roll of wrapping-paper in a department store, which is then torn off the dispenser and used to wrap a parcel) and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) (where they are literally written, seemingly in chalk, on the sidewalk down which a character is seen walking).
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