Orson Welles originally planned for this film to be made as part of an anthology of adaptations of stories by Karen Blixen. Originally made for French TV, it was later released in theaters. This movie is available on DVD from The Criterion Collection.
This film is part of the Criterion Collection, spine #831.
In the original short story by Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen, upon which this movie is based, the eccentric, very wealthy protagonist is referred to only as "Mr. Clay." In the film, the character, played by Orson Welles, is called "Charles Clay." The added given name is a deliberate echo of Welles' most famous role: Charles Foster Kane, the similarly very wealthy and eccentric protagonist of Citizen Kane (1941).
This is the third creative collaboration between Welles and international superstar Jeanne Moreau in a film that Welles directed and released (they also appeared in one other movie not directed by him), following The Trial (1962) and Chimes at Midnight (1965), aka "Falstaff." They later made a fourth film together, called The Deep (1970), directed by Welles and based on the novel "Dead Calm" by Charles Williams, but that film was never finished or released. (There are conflicting explanations as to why the film was never completed; a version of this "lost" film is still in existence.) Many years later, in 1989, a different film based on the same Charles Williams novel, Dead Calm (1989), by director Phillip Noyce and starring the young Nicole Kidman, was released.