Rudolph Valentino signed onto the film for $350 a week, less than Wallace Beery earned for his small role as a German officer. Metro provided Valentino only with his Argentine gaucho costume and his French soldier's uniform. For the Parisian sequence Valentino purchased more than 25 custom-fitted suits from a New York tailor, which he spent the next year paying for.
Alice Terry wore a blonde wig during filming. She and Rudolph Valentino spoke French in their scenes to make them more authentic to lip-readers.
Adjusted for inflation, this film is the highest-grossing silent movie ever; it earned $9,183,673 - about $132 million in 2019 dollars.
The top-grossing US film of 1921.
Early on one of the intertitles says, "Von Hartrott had reared his sons to respect the teachings of his Fatherland". The picture behind the text is of the statue of Kaiser Wilhelm II on the Deutsches Eck at Koblenz, the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle rivers. The statue was destroyed by the Americans in 1945, but replaced in the '90s.