When Sammy and Susan are at the Hickory Tree nightclub, Susan spots Gillian, an old acquaintance, and asks Sammy to start talking, to avoid the meeting. Sammy starts, and then Susan joins in reciting the following lines: "I never nurs'd a dear gazelle / To glad me with its soft black eye / But when it came to know me well / And love me, it was sure to die." These lines are from the poem "Lalla Rookh" (in the section entitled "The Fire Worshipers") by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852).
Robert Morley, who plays "The Minister" is credited at the end as simply "A Guest." His name never appears.
This film marked the return of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to Alexander Korda's London Films, after a successful but rather strained period at Rank.
The film takes place in March 1943.
Following a string of brilliant successes from the Powell-Pressburger team (films which had been equally successful in the US), this movie was a box-office failure. It has been suggested that its sharply downbeat view of wartime bureaucracy was not something a 1949 audience wanted to hear about. Over the years, however, it has come to be recognized as one of the team's finest and most mature films.