Trivia: Steve McQueen, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson later starred together in another John Sturges movie, "The Great Escape."
Trivia: John Wayne had been wanting to do this picture for years but he could not get any backing. He finally used his own money and he felt the financial setback for years, because the picture did not do as well as expected. Duke would always say that he had to continue to work and make pictures to survive. He was nowhere near broke, but to keep up his lifestyle he worked almost to his death.
Trivia: When he was president, John F. Kennedy wanted to see this film so much he went to it in a local cinema wearing a disguise.
Trivia: This film is loosely based on the Scopes Case, where in 1925, a Tennesee subsitute teacher was accused of violating a law that prohibits the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution. This case pitted Christian fundamentalists (who rejected the theory of evolution as they felt it contradict their literal belief of the Bible) against supporters of evolution.
Trivia: In the film, Pollyanna shows Reverend Ford (when he practices his fired up sermon in the field) the locket with the quotation "When you look for the bad in mankind expecting to find it, you surely will," inscribed upon it and then credits the adage to Abraham Lincoln. Seeing an opportunity, Roy Disney, Walt's brother and Disney Studio CEO, had thousands of promotional lockets with those inscribed words (duplicates of Pollyanna's charm bracelet as well) produced and sent to gift shops. By a stroke of luck, while on a family trip to Disneyland, the screenwriter/director, David Swift, happened to notice the locket copies in one of the Disney gift shops and contacted Roy at the Disney Studio and told him to recall all the lockets straight away, because he deliberately fabricated the quote for the film - Abraham Lincoln never said it.
Trivia: Robert Mitchum (born 1917) was only eleven years older than George Peppard (born 1928), who plays his son.
Trivia: To make the office appear larger than it was, the team used forced perspective - adult actors at the front, with child actors behind them, and tiny desks with wire-operated dolls at the back.
Trivia: Max von Sydow plays Birgitta Pettersson's father in this film. In real life, von Sydow (born 1929) is only ten years older than Pettersson (born 1939).
Trivia: Even though Roger Livesey plays Laurence Oliver's father in the movie, he was only a year older than Oliver.
Trivia: Although Lionel Jeffries and John Fraser play father and son in this film, Jeffries was only five years older than Fraser.
Trivia: Esmond P. Knight, the actor who portrayed Captain Leach of the battleship "Prince of Wales" was a crew member on the ship during the real battle where he was badly injured, suffering a period of blindness.
Trivia: Kidnapped was Disney's only feature film to be released on MCA's ill-fated DiscoVision format. But the movie did launch a famous actor's career: His role as Alan Breck Stewart's bagpipe-playing kinsman, Robin MacGregor, was Peter O'Toole's film debut.