Mary Pickford was originally slated to make her comeback with this film but later dropped out of the project.
The Legion of Decency did not like the movie because of what it considered the film's "pro-Communist" leanings. Instead of condemning the picture, though, it used a "separate classification" for it. That had previously been used on Blockade (a Spanish Civil War film that the League also thought was anti-Catholic and pro-Communist) and Martin Luther (because the film portrayed the life of the man who split Christianity, and also because the League thought it was full of inaccurate presentations of Church teachings).