John Cromwell began directing on June 15th, 1937 but soon left the project after just five days of shooting, due to "differences of opinion on story treatment," according to a press release. The film's producer Samuel Goldwyn then attempted to rope in William Wyler for the job. Wyler wanted nothing to do with it, so Goldwyn persuaded John Ford to take over for a few days until he could find a permanent replacement for Cromwell. Archie Mayo was eventually brought in to finish the picture.
Lana Turner later recalled in a Gary Cooper biography that her "fancy black oriental wig" had been glued around her face with spirit gum, while she felt extremely uncomfortable in her costumes, and worse yet, had her eyebrows shaved off, at the insistence of Samuel Goldwyn himself, and replaced them with false slanting black ones.
Mrs. Ng as "Chen Tsu's Mother" is in studio records/casting call lists, but the character did not appear in the movie. Because of period and location makeup, some of the other actors are difficult to recognize.
The film was received poorly at the box-office, becoming the biggest flop up to that time for both Gary Cooper and Samuel Goldwyn; it was estimated that the picture lost close to $700,000.
This marked the screen debut of Samuel Goldwyn's protégé Sigrid Gurie, whom he publicly labeled "the Norwegian Garbo--even though she was born in Brooklyn, NY.