Director Don Siegel liked to assemble his casts for script readings just before he started shooting, and he got angry with Edmond O'Brien for refusing to attend the reading. Later he found out why: O'Brien was nearly blind from cataracts and couldn't read scripts himself. Instead, every night during the shooting of a film, he would have his wife read him the scenes he was supposed to shoot the next day and would memorize his lines from her reading them. O'Brien didn't want word of his disability to get out for fear no one would hire him if they knew.
This was director Don Siegel's first film for Columbia Pictures, and all his friends warned him about Columbia's notoriously tough head, Harry Cohn. Siegel, however, found Cohn surprisingly easy to work with. "He was a pussycat compared to [Jack L. Warner]," Siegel later said.
Made it's New York television debut on 26 June 1964 on WCBS, channel 2.