The film recorded a loss of $1.6 million. It didn't do well at either the U.S. or German box office because the story felt much more sinister in 1961 when the Berlin Wall was erected.
In an early scene, MacNamara begins negotiating with the three Russians, who offer him a Cuban cigar. The Russians tell MacNamara that they have a trade agreement: "We send them rockets, they send us cigars." What was written as a joke later turned out to be the truth--within one year (October 1962), Russian missiles were discovered in Cuba.
Joan Crawford (then on the board of PepsiCo) telephoned director Billy Wilder to protest the movie's Coca-Cola connection. Wilder then added a final scene in which James Cagney buys four bottles of Coke from a vending machine. The last bottle out of the machine isn't Coke but another brand . . . Pepsi.
The building of the Berlin Wall began on the night of August 13, 1961, right through the set at the Brandenburger Tor. The team, discovering the change in the morning, had to move to Munich to shoot the remaining scenes on the parking lot of the Bavaria Film Studios, where a copy of the lower half of the Brandenburger Tor had to be built.
James Cagney had such a negative experience making this picture that he retired from films for 20 years until his cameo in Ragtime (1981).