Did You Know?

Mickey Rooney is usually thought to have been eleven when he made this film. He was actually 14 during filming.

Film debut of Olivia de Havilland, although it was released after her next two films, Alibi Ike and The Irish in Us.

The movie was banned in Germany by the Nazi government because Max Reinhardt and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy were Jews and considered undesirable.

None of Ernest Haller's photography is in the finished film; he was fired and replaced by Hal Mohr, who re-did everything that Haller had shot.

Composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold was personally chosen by director Max Reinhardt. Both agreed in an early production stage to use the original incidental music written by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy as the film's soundtrack. (Reinhardt did a stage production of the play before and used Mendelssohn's music.) As the film runs over two hours it was obvious that Mendelssohn's composition would be too short. Instead of just repeating several musical cues to fit the film's final length Korngold adapted the incidental music and parts of some other compositions by Mendelssohn, re-orchestrated them for a larger orchestra and choir (most notably heard in his Wedding March version at the end) and composed some short musical bridges by himself. Thus he created a complete symphonic score for the movie based on Mendelssohn's music. However, he chose to remain uncredited as a composer and insisted on giving full musical credit to Mendelssohn.

James Cagney's daughter, Cathleen Cagney, has said when she was a child and saw this movie, she was so upset by the scene where her father is turned into a donkey, that they had to bring James out to calm her down.