Trivia

At one point during filming, Bruce Dern questioned Sir Alfred Hitchcock about why he was cast. Hitchcock replied, "Because Mr. Packinow wanted a million dollars, and Hitch doesn't pay a million dollars." It took Dern a while to realize that "Mr. Packinow" was Al Pacino.

Cinematographer Leonard J. South once said of working with Sir Alfred Hitchcock on this movie: "He asks what lens you have on the camera, then he looks at the scene and he knows what will appear on the screen. He's rarely wrong, and he never moves the camera without a reason. When it moves, it's because the audience should be looking around with the actors. He's very specific about that."

To make the cemetery in this movie appear weedy with long grass, the cemetery was paid by the production to let the grass and weeds grow for a whole four months without weeding and maintenance.

Bruce Dern had previously worked with Sir Alfred Hitchcock on episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955), as well as having had a small role in Marnie (1964). Dern once said of working with Hitchcock on this movie: "He noticed everything, a shadow on a performer's face, a few seconds too long on a take. Just when we thought he had no idea what was going on, he'd snap us all to attention with the most incredible awareness of some small but disastrous detail that nobody would have noticed until it got on-screen, and then he'd be bored again."

When Burt Reynolds was considered for the part of Arthur Adamson, Sir Alfred Hitchcock watched The Longest Yard (1974) to see if he was right for the role. Instead, Hitchcock was impressed with Ed Lauter and cast him in the role of Maloney.

Alfred Hitchcock: (At around forty-five minutes) In silhouette behind the door at the registrar of births and deaths. Beyond representing his typical oblique appearance that was a feature of all of this films, in this example he makes fun of himself. His rear-projected silhouette was part of the opening of every episode of his long-running television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955). Although the series completed its run a decade before this film, it had been in constant reruns ever since and right through the 1970s.