Kathryn Grayson and Oreste Kirkop disliked each other intensely. An opera star, Kirkop considered her "merely a singer in movies" and she considered him to be a "pompous oaf." During the filming they spoke to each other only when required by the script.
Although Maltese-born Oreste managed to vocalize in English, by singing the words phonetically, he was unable to deal with the English language dialogue, and so his accent disappears whenever he speaks, since an uncredited off-screen voice actor is speaking the lines into the microphone.
Filmed between December 1954 and February 1955, but not released until September 1956 after spending eighteen months on the shelf, this was a box office failure for Paramount, unlike The Court Jester, which used some of the same sets & costumes, and was one of the year's big successes.