Trivia

To film the striking images of a deserted New York City, the cast and crew had to start filming at dawn in order to capture the city before the early morning rush. This gave them no more than an hour or two per day in which to film the sequence.

When Ralph marks his route to New York City on the map, he starts at a point near the center of Pennsylvania. There is no real town of Chatsburg in PA, but there is a town near his starting point called "Bellefonte". (The character Ralph Burton is played by Harry Belafonte).

The montage of the lion statues when Ralph rings the bell at St. Patrick's Cathedral is an homage to the stone lion montage in Battleship Potemkin (1925) and is also parodied in Woody Allen's Sleeper (1973).

This film was boycotted by some theaters in the South, and in one case a showing in Georgia was halted because of erupting racial tensions in the audience.

One of the books on the shelf behind the bed in which Ben Thacker is recovering is "The Proud Land" by James Lee Bartlow. The book is a prominent feature in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), where Dick Powell plays Bartlow. Also on the shelf are real books by George Burns (I Love Her, That's Why!), George Bernard Shaw (Complete Works of), Josephine Pinckney (Three O'Clock Dinner), and Jane Austen (Pride and Predjudice).