Director Gene Kelly says that he accepted this assignment as a way of fulfilling the final obligation of his long-term contract with M-G-M, but studio executives stipulated he had to shoot it in black-and-white, using only one main set, with a production schedule of only three weeks, and with a strict budget of just $500,000. The studio was delighted when Kelly was able to honor all those provisos, but the film proved to be a box office disappointment.
Doris Day wrote that her manager/husband Martin Melcher was terribly concerned over the box-office failure of this film and It Happened to Jane (1959). Their failures caused Day to drop out of the Top Ten Box Office Stars. Day and Melcher had words about him hustling her into almost any film for the money instead of waiting to find good scripts that would have produced better results.
This was the third of four films in which Gig Young co-starred with Doris Day. The others were That Touch of Mink (1962), Young at Heart (1954) and Teacher's Pet (1958), for which Young was Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actor.
While this film proved to be a dud, Doris Day's other 1958 release Teacher's Pet (1958), in which she co-starred with Clark Gable and Gig Young, was a big hit. As a result, Day tumbled from the Top Ten Box Office Stars list, but landed in 15th place for the year.