This play was recorded on tape, not filmed. Despite this, it was transferred to celluloid to enable a (limited) cinema release in the U.K., with a running time of ninety-eight minutes. The resulting reduction of picture quality was universally derided by British reviewers.
Graham Greene disliked this television version of his novel, although he preferred it to John Ford's movie version, The Fugitive (1947). He told one interviewer in the 1980s that all he could now remember about it was that George C. Scott had been very good, and Sir Laurence Olivier very bad.
This was producer David Susskind's second attempt at turning Graham Greene's famous story into a TV play; there had been an another version some two years earlier, featured on "Play Of The Week" and casting James Donald as the priest. That version had been a TV adaptation of the stage play by Dennis Cannan and Pierre Bost derived from Greene's novel, but the 1961 version went back to the original.
In the one review published here, the author says Patty Duke is not believable as a Mexican girl. In the scene he referenced, she states, "We're Americans."