In the first year of the Academy Awards, winners had been announced three months before the ceremony took place. Emil Jannings, who had been named Best Actor for his work in this particular film and The Way of All Flesh (1927), was planning to depart for his home in Germany, so he requested that he receive his award before he left. The Academy honored his request, effectively making Jannings the first person to officially receive an Academy Award. He would also become the first no-show winner.
Based on the life of Theodore Lodi, a former general in the Russian army of Czar Nicholas, who fled Russia after the 1917 Communist revolution and wound up in Hollywood, where he worked for a while as a movie extra.
Both Emil Jannings and William Powell clashed with director Josef von Sternberg. Powell rewrote his contract with a provision that he never be assigned to any future Sternberg production.
Rumors have circulated that this film had originally been nominated for Best Production during the Academy's first year. However, this has never been confirmed, and the Academy claims that it had never been a Best Production nominee.
Ernst Lubitsch claimed that his friend Theodore Lodi inspired the story. Lubitsch had met Lodi in Russia when he was a General in the Imperial Russian Army. After the Russian Revolution, Lubitsch encountered the ex-general once more in Hollywood when he appeared in full dress uniform seeking work as an extra at $7.50 a day. Lubitsch recounted this incident to screenwriter Lajos Biró who turned Lubitsch's story into this film. Lodi went on to appear in a number of Hollywood films including as a Russian exile who is forced to work as a hotel doorman in Down to Earth (1932).