The studio built a full carnival set on the back lot at 20th Century Fox covering ten acres, and hired over 100 sideshow attractions and carnival workers.
According to Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation, charlatans and grifters in the new age/mystic con would use the phrase "Are you a friend of Stan Carlisle?", or a variation of it, to confirm that the person they were talking to was in the same line of business.
20th Century Fox bought the film rights to William Lindsay Gresham's novel in September, 1946 for $50,000 (about $700,000 in 2021) at the request of the studio's star Tyrone Power, who wanted to change his screen image as a romantic lead or swashbuckler.
Studio head Darryl F. Zanuck found this movie so generally distasteful that he eventually took it out of circulation, but it was theatrically re-released in 1956-1957, did good business, particularly in the drive-in circuit, and received wide distribution. After Tyrone Power's premature death in 1958, widespread public demand for it on television resulted in its initial telecast in New York City Saturday 10 January 1959 on WRCA (Channel 4), followed by Salt Lake City Tuesday 27 January 1959 on KTVT (Channel 4), by Wichita Wednesday 28 January 1959 on KTVH (Channel 12), by San Francisco/Oakland Tuesday 3 March 1959 on KTVU (Channel 2), and soon spreading far and wide as a result of its extraordinarily high ratings. Its 2005 DVD release as part of the 20th Century Fox "noir" series brought the movie back once again into even wider circulation.
Geek: Originally from the German word "geck," meaning fool or simpleton, and a term used around circuses and carnivals to describe a wild man or woman. A typical geek show in the mid nineteenth century would have a person on stage biting the head off of an animal and drinking its blood. Often dragged out, the act of biting off the head was the pinnacle of the performance, leaving the audience with a scene of bloodshed and death.
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