Trivia

For the filming of the climactic charge, one hundred twenty-five horses were trip-wired. Of those, twenty-five were killed outright or had to be put down afterward. The resulting public furor caused the US Congress to pass laws to protect animals used in motion pictures. Star Errol Flynn, a horseman, was so outraged by the number of horses injured and killed during the charge, and by director Michael Curtiz's seeming indifference to the carnage, that at one point as he was arguing with Curtiz about it, he could contain himself no more and actually physically attacked him. They were pulled apart before any serious damage was done, but it put a permanent freeze on their relationship; even though they made subsequent films together, they despised each other and would speak only when necessary on the set.

Unlike the rest of Errol Flynn's blockbuster films, because of the use of trip wires, a practice later banned by the studios, which resulted in many horses being killed and injured, this film was never re-released by Warner Brothers.

In the famous charge scene, Errol Flynn, playing Major Vickers, is thrown to the ground when his horse is shot out from underneath him, jumps back up and leaps on a passing riderless horse. Although Flynn supposedly did the horse fall himself - he was a good horseman and liked to do his own stunts when possible - the man leaping up from the ground and mounting the passing horse is not Flynn but his longtime stunt double Buster Wiles.

During the filming of the charge sequence, a stuntman was killed when he fell off his horse and landed on a broken sword that was lying on the battlefield. It was unfortunately wedged in such a position that its blade was sticking straight up and the stuntman landed directly on top of it. There was a rumor that another stuntman came back from lunch drunk and during the charge slid off his horse and died when he broke his neck in the fall, but that has never been confirmed.

The original script used the real-life siege of a British fort at Cawnpore (and subsequent massacre of its survivors) during the Sepoy Rebellion - a nationwide mutiny of Indian soldiers, called "sepoys", in the British army - as the reason for the famous Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava during the Crimean War. However, shortly before the film was started, someone pointed out that the Sepoy Rebellion took place three years *after* the Crimean War. The fort's name was hurriedly changed to Chukoti, and instead of mutinous Indian soldiers, the besiegers were changed to tribesmen of a fictitious warlord called Surat Khan.