After Robert Mitchum got fed up with repeated re-takes in which director Otto Preminger ordered him to slap Jean Simmons across the face, he turned around and slapped Preminger, asking whether it was this way he wanted it. Preminger immediately demanded of producer Howard Hughes that Mitchum be replaced. Hughes refused. (Mitchum starred in Preminger's "River of No Return" two years later.)
At first Otto Preminger refused to direct this movie, because he hated the script. The normally reclusive Howard Hughes personally picked up Preminger in his car and persuaded him to make the movie. "I'm going to get even with that little bitch," Hughes told Preminger, referring to Jean Simmons, "and you're going to help me." He gave Preminger permission to rewrite the script and promised him a bonus if he could finish the picture in 18 days. By that time Simmons' contract with Hughes would have expired.
Prior to a 6/21/11 airing on TCM, Robert Osborne revealed that this was the final film of Jean Simmons under her contract with Howard Hughes --he'd bought it without her knowledge from the J. Arthur Rank Organization in England. Her displeasure led her to cut her hair off, knowing that Hughes preferred long-haired leading ladies and thinking it might prevent him from utilizing her before the contract's end date. Instead, he put her in this film, and she was given a wig to wear throughout. He also promised the director Otto Preminger a bonus if he finished shooting before Simmons' contract expired, which he collected.
The film was loosely inspired by the March 15, 1947, murders of 62-year-old Walter Overall and his wife Beulah, 57. The Overalls' 17-year-old daughter, Beulah Louise Overall, and her 21-year-old lover, Bud Gollum, were both charged with their murders, but they were both acquitted on October 5, 1947, after a 133-day trial.
RKO borrowed director Otto Preminger from Twentieth Century-Fox for this film. Fox's head of production Darryl F. Zanuck owed RKO's Howard Hughes some favors.