According to the introduction by Robert Osborne on a TCM broadcast, Lucille Ball was going to play the Frank Morgan role of the fellow con-artist to Fred Astaire.
Originally intended to star Fred Astaire and Judy Garland. Plans were abandoned after Garland was cast in the big budget western musical The Harvey Girls (1946). The two would eventually co-star in Easter Parade (1948).
The original magazine short story by Ludwig Bemelmans and Jacques Théry is written in the form of a film treatment, leading to speculation that it actually was one to begin with, and that the authors, failing to sell it to a movie studio, presented it as magazine fiction instead. Once it had been published in a magazine, MGM was happy to pay the authors $23,000 ($413,000 in 2024) for the film rights.
The sequence in which Bremer sings "Angel" while being bathed, groomed and otherwise prepared for her first encounter with Astaire is analogous to how Bremer was handled by M-G-M. Both studio head Louis B. Mayer and the head of their musicals unit Arthur Freed were convinced that, properly presented onscreen, Bremer would become one of their biggest stars. But the public never took a liking to her (as this film's box office failure demonstrated) and less than five years after her breakthrough role as Judy Garland's older sister in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Bremer walked away from her stalled film career, and permanently retired from the screen.
This film's visual style, with musical numbers staged like dream sequences featuring painted backdrops rather than full-fledged sets, low-key lighting and background dancers wearing brightly colored costumes as they cavort around the film's two stars, was thought to be a major factor in its failure to draw an audience. Yet a similar style was used five years later in An American in Paris (1951), and that film was not only one of M-G-M's biggest hits, but was also one of the few movie musicals to win an Oscar for Best Picture.