According to the sleeve notes of the Australian Warner Home Video cassette release, the name 'Beach Red' was "named after the actual beach chosen by General Douglas MacArthur in 1942 to fulfill his famous promise that 'We will return'."
Director Cornel Wilde explained his editing process in an interview with British 'Films and Filming' magazine in October 1970: "I think that a cut from one scene to another should have an impact, should carry you from a certain degree of involvement and excitement to something else without letting you down...I really think that a good deal of happenstance editing still goes on, and part of my style is that I like to feel there is a reason and impact to every frame of film. Nothing should be wasted."
In an interview with British 'Films and Filming' magazine in October 1970, director Cornel Wilde discussed his on-set methodology : "I used to find so often in Hollywood that there was nothing more tedious than waiting around. Many directors used a stereotypical system of master shot, medium shot, over-shoulder shots, and then close-ups, with long pauses in between for cameras and lights to be adjusted. I got to my dressing room to paint or write- anything to keep my mind alive. So now my policy is to keep three camera crews working simultaneously, so that actors can move from one set-up to the next without delay. I get the occasional protest, but it isn't easy for anybody to complain that I'm working them too hard, because they can see that I'm working harder than anybody else myself."
Peter Bowman's uniquely constructed novel "Beach Red" was published in 1945, near the end of World War II. The book chronicles an assault landing on a Japanese-held island in the Pacific and the subsequent advance of a four-man Army recon patrol in the jungle, through the thoughts of one of its members. A contemporary review of the book stated the novel "looks like unrhymed verse, but...author Bowman stoutly insists (it) is "sprung prose." A modern-day reviewer accurately described "Beach Red" as "...not a novel. It is a 61-page prose poem, organized in non-rhyming stanzas with varying numbers of lines in each stanza."
The film utilized actual real color combat footage provided by the U.S. Marine Corps filmed during military campaigns in the Pacific Islands.
The film was predominantly filmed in the Philippines (the closing credits state it was also filmed in Japan). The Philippine Armed Forces were used to act as the Japanese army.
The Japanese language is not subtitled in this movie as with director Cornel Wilde's earlier film The Naked Prey.
The movie has only one musical element. This is a song written by Antonino Buenaventura and sung by Jean Wallace. It also is heard in other variations throughout the film.
The opening landing sequence in the Steven Spielberg World War II movie Saving Private Ryan is considered similar to the same in this movie.
The sequence where the Japanese army mimicked the US Marines by wearing their uniforms was inspired from the source novel. It includes a passage where the Japanese wore American helmets whilst penetrating the American lines.
The U.S. Marine Corps could only provide color stock footage from the Pacific Island campaigns for this movie due to a lack of resources available due to the Vietnam War. This stock footage had deteriorated and as such a considerable amount of resources from this movie's budget had to be directed towards its film restoration i.e. towards making the stock footage adequately match the film.