It was produced by Ford and Bernard Smith from a screenplay by Janet Green and John McCormick, based on the short story "Chinese Finale" by Norah Lofts.

Ford biographer Joseph McBride dubbed the director's farewell to the art form "as bleak an apocalyptic vision as the cinema has given us.

Charles Pether is a teacher who always wanted to be a preacher; his loud, peevish, panicky, self-centered and domineering 42-year-old wife Florrie is pregnant for the first time.

The staff are shocked to discover that Cartwright is a woman from  Chicago who smokes, drinks alcohol, swears, wears pants, has short hair, disdains religion and sits before grace.

Dr. Cartwright urges Pether to send Florrie to a modern maternity ward to have her baby, because her age places her at high risk, but they refuse.

The emergency passes and an intoxicated Cartwright appears in the dining room with a bottle of whiskey, offering a drink to all and provoking an extreme reaction in Mrs. Russell.

Miss Ling, who comes from a powerful Mandarin family, is taken away to act as servant to Tunga Khan's young wife, and the seven white women are herded into a shed.

The original story, "Chinese Finale," was presented as an episode of Alcoa Theatre in March 1960 with Hilda Plowright as Miss Andrews and Jan Sterling as Dr. Mary Cartwright.

[4] John Ford considered both Katharine Hepburn and Jennifer Jones for the role of Dr. Cartwright, and Rosalind Russell lobbied for the part, but eventually Patricia Neal was cast.

"[5] Ford originally considered Carol Lynley for the role of Emma Clark but MGM insisted on contract star Sue Lyon.

[9] In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Howard Thompson wrote: "Mr. Ford's picture, which gets off to a graphic, arresting start (with some ripe Elmer Bernstein music) tapers off to a stark, bony melodrama of female hysteria and mayhem.

earthy performance by Miss Bancroft, as a profane hard-bitten doctor whose arrival tilts the mission even before the barbarians roar into view.

Miss Bancroft, a little mannered heretofore, is simply wonderful, from her first bleak appraisal of the premises to the obvious, tragic fadeout, by which time the mission seems like an Oriental East Lynne.