The film's premiere was planned for Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an Amish community, but the town's prudish mayor, Kendig Bare, refused to permit the screening because he considered the film too violent and sexy.
One of the lowest-budgeted films ever shot in CinemaScope and De Luxe color.
The year before, Victor Mature, Ernest Borgnine, and Richard Egan were all in the big budget Biblical epic Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) (the sequel to The Robe, that featured Mature). All three large, brawny actors played gladiators and the characters played by Mature and Egan were bitter enemies. However, in this movie, Mature and Egan are close friends while Borgnine, who was the strongest and deadliest of the gladiators, and who forces Mature to fight in the arena, is a passive Amish farmer who Mature has to talk into fighting the bad guys. Lastly, in both films, the characters played by Borgnine and Mature refuse to fight because of their religion, but then have to adapt for survival.
In his autobiography, Ernest Borgnine reports that during filming, Richard Fleischer asked Victor Mature to do a stunt which entailed diving underneath a car. Even with a hole in the ground, Mature refused because he had once done a scene and broke his leg on a motorcycle for which he wasn't compensated.