Robert Newton plays Private Bill Sykes. He memorably played the Charles Dickens villain Bill Sykes in the David Lean adaptation of Oliver Twist (1948). The characters Sykes, Malloy, and Ackroyd are loosely adapted from characters named Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris in the Rudyard Kipling stories.
David Niven had the most real life military service of the lead cast. He had been a junior officer in the British Army prior to turning to acting in the mid-thirties. When war was declared in 1939, he returned to England and rejoined the Army.
Director Tay Garnett says in his autobiography that he was not satisfied with this film, but also admitted that when viewing it decades later on television, he found it not so bad after all.
Cyril Cusack's first Hollywood film.
Walter Pidgeon, who plays Colonel Brunswick, was born in Saint John, New Brunswick.