[2][3] The film was a considerable departure from Logan's previous two projects, the drama Sayonara, which won multiple Academy Awards, and the blockbuster South Pacific.

Meanwhile, his ethics professor, Leo Sullivan, is coming under extreme student and faculty pressure to reverse the failure and give Blent a passing grade.

He wanted to guide her through her first film experience – she had been modelling for several years – but Fonda found it a "Kafkaesque nightmare," explaining in her autobiography My Life So Far that during the making of Tall Story she suffered from bulimia, sleepwalking and irrational fears that she was "boring, untalented and plain.

"[6] In 2019, Fonda stated both she and Logan were in love with lead actor Anthony Perkins at the time of filming, causing tension during an already difficult shoot.

A Time magazine reviewer wrote: "Nothing could possibly save the picture, not even the painfully personable Perkins doing his famous awkward act, not even a second-generation Fonda with a smile like her father's and legs like a chorus girl.

"[6] The Washington Star was displeased: “The title of the picture...is ‘Tall Story,’ but there are a great many more apt adjectives, one of which is ‘dull’ and another ‘trivial’...the funny thing about it is that so many talented humans can manage to look inept at one time and all one place.

Among those are director Logan, players Anthony Perkins, Henry Fonda’s daughter Jane, and Ray Walston, and the original authors Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.” [9]