Rod Serling took 19 months to complete the teleplay, the longest he ever spent writing a single screenplay. It also took seven re-writes to get to the final version, the most of any of his screenplays.
Walter Pidgeon hums "The Last Time I Saw Paris." Two years earlier, he had co-starred in a movie based on the song itself (The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)).
The original teleplay writer, Rod Serling, liked the film adaptation. But he felt the film version could and should have shown some of the POW camp in flashbacks. He did, however, feel that the scene with the father and son alone was better written in the film version than in his original teleplay.
The movie being watched by the soldiers in the hospital near the beginning of this film is The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953), also produced by MGM, with Debbie Reynolds seen on-screen in the chemistry lab.