Twenty-two-year-old Dame Angela Lansbury wanted the sympathetic part of the waif-like village girl Effie, but was forced to play Mabel, the thirty-five-year-old, shrewish wife of fifty-year-old Walter Pidgeon. This brought home to Lansbury that she would never be a star player at MGM. The role of Effie went to Janet Leigh, Lansbury's future co-star in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). In that movie, Lansbury again played an unsympathetic older woman, but would cite the part of Mrs. Iselin as her favorite movie role.
A contemporary news article reported that this was the first movie to be printed and released on the new, non-flammable Eastman safety base positive film stock. Previously, film had been nitrate-based - stock that would degrade over time and was highly flammable. MGM had been experimenting with this new film for a year previously.
David O. Selznick bought the film rights to the book in 1939. He intended on casting either Joan Fontaine or Vivien Leigh in the female leads and Leslie Howard or Sir Laurence Olivier in the male leads with John Cromwell directing. Selznick abandoned the project and sold it to producer/director Alexander Korda who intended Robert Donat and Greer Garson to be the stars, as that pairing had been so successful in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). That deal fell apart after Donat became unavailable.
This movie did poorly at the box-office for MGM, resulting in a loss of $465,000 ($5.68M in 2022), according to studio records.
To be "At home" in British English means one is available to receive guests, and usually indicates a reception of some type, either formal or casual.