This was the first musical feature film to be shot on location. In a TCM interview, Ann Miller took the credit for pleading and persuading Louis B. Mayer to do the shoot on location as she had "never seen New York".
When Gene Kelly dismisses the beauty of a passing New York girl, Jules Munshin asks, "Who you got waiting for you in New York, Ava Gardner?" Frank Sinatra was having an affair with Gardner at the time.
When the film premiered at the Radio City Music Hall there was then the largest line to get in, in that theater's history. After the film's initial success, Arthur Freed, the producer of this film, recalled that his unit was in the MGM commissary passing the Joe Pasternak unit (which made less expensive musicals), the Pasternak unit said, "There goes the royal family." Indeed, this picture was at the time the second largest-grossing in MGM history, next to Meet Me in St. Louis.