Critics were overwhelmingly negative when the film came out, and it was the consensus that Elia Kazan should never have filmed his own best-selling novel, which was panned by most literary critics as trash when it was published in 1967. It was widely known that the lead role had been turned down by Marlon Brando, who had garnered three Academy Award nominations and was awarded one Oscar under Kazan's direction at the beginning of his film career and was the heart and soul of some of Kazan's best work as a movie director. By the late 1960s, after a string of flops, most critics felt Brando was through as a movie star and that he desperately needed Kazan to turn his career around, both as an artist and as a box-office star. When the film came out, Kirk Douglas' lead performance was roundly panned, and most critics felt that even Brando at his best couldn't save what was, in essence, a melodramatic potboiler. The failure of "The Arrangement" was the end of Kazan's own career as an A-list director.
Richard Boone, who plays the father of Kirk Douglas' character in the film, was actually six months younger than Douglas in real life.
Faye Dunaway's fee for this film was $600,000, far more than Elia Kazan wanted to pay her. His next film, The Visitors (1972), was a small independent production made with unknown actors and a skeleton crew far away from Hollywood. Kazan claimed that this was a reaction to the excessive cost of "The Arrangement" and liked to say that the whole film was made for the same amount that Dunaway's agent had made out of the previous film.
In his autobiography, Elia Kazan says he wanted Marlon Brando to play the protagonist of his film, Eddie Anderson. Brando initially agreed to play the role, but backed out after the assassination of Martin Luther King, saying he could not go on with the film in light of such terrible events. While Kazan, a political person himself, took Brando's exit graciously, he wondered whether Brando's excuse was just a con and that he didn't really want to play the role. Kazan says that Brando's interest in playing the role, during their discussions, never got beyond his desire that the studio use a particular Italian wigmaker for his hairpieces. On his part, Kazan had urged Brando to lose weight so that the character would be "lean and hungry."
The $62.70 cab fare that Eddie ran up would be equivalent to about $462 in 2021.