Billy Wilder claimed the liquor industry offered Paramount Pictures $5 million not to release the film; he also suggested that he would have accepted had they offered it to him personally.
Ray Milland checked himself into Bellevue Hospital with the help of resident doctors, in order to experience the horror of a drunk ward. Milland was given an iron bed and locked inside the "booze tank." That night, a new arrival came into the ward screaming, an entrance that immersed the whole ward in hysteria. With the ward falling into bedlam, a robed and barefoot Milland escaped while the door was ajar and slipped out onto 34th Street where he tried to hail a cab. When a suspicious cop spotted him, Milland tried to explain, but the cop didn't believe him, especially after he noticed the Bellevue insignia on his robe. The actor was dragged back to Bellevue where it took him a half-hour to explain his situation to the authorities before he was finally released.
It was only in later years that Billy Wilder discovered that the title of Charles R. Jackson's novel is a typo. It was supposed to have been called "The Last Weekend".
Ray Milland didn't give an acceptance speech at the Academy Awards when he picked up his Best Actor Oscar. He merely acknowledged the crowd's applause and then left the podium without saying anything.
The first film featuring a theremin on the soundtrack--a musical instrument that produces a strange "wailing" sound that later became familiar to 1950s science-fiction film audiences. Miklós Rózsa used it in composing the score for the nightmare sequences.