"Lux Radio Theater" broadcast a 60 minute radio adaptation of the movie on Monday, November 19th, 1951 with Hedy Lamarr and Victor Mature reprising their film roles.
"Samson and Delilah" was far and away the top-grossing film of 1949 at $11,000,000. The second highest film, "Battleground," grossed only $4,554,000 by comparison.
Steve Reeves was also considered and DeMille lobbied long and hard to get the studio to pick up Reeves, but both DeMille and the studio wanted Reeves to tone down his physique, which Reeves, still young and new to the industry, ultimately refused to do.
Victor Mature won the role of Samson over Burt Lancaster, who had a bad back and was considered too young. Henry Wilcoxon was considered, but thought to be too old.
Sunset Blvd. was also being filmed around Paramount at the same time as this movie. In a scene where Gloria Swanson's character Norma Desmond visits the sound stage to see Cecil B. DeMille, he was actually directing a scene from Samson and Delilah and the actual cast members and crew are seen taking a break from this feature.
Victor Young's lush background music, nominated for an Academy Award in the competition for 1950, would become his penultimate best-score recognition, followed by his posthumous win for Around the World in Eighty Days. In the years between, the Academy failed to nominate two superlative, nuanced Young scores - for The Quiet Man and Shane.
A false story has circulated that George Reeves auditioned for the role of Samson in Samson and Delilah but lost the role to Victor Mature. Reeves was never under consideration for the role of Samson. However, he was given a role as the wounded messenger at the recommendation of Mature, who was very loyal to his friends from his student days at the Pasadena Community Playhouse. Many of the smaller roles in Samson and Delilah, were also played by Mature's friends from Pasadena.
According to the biography 'The Presidents and the Preacher', Cecil B. DeMille originally offered the role of Samson to the young Billy Graham, then experiencing his first national fame as an evangelist. Graham turned the offer down flat, telling DeMille that he had no ambitions beyond his calling to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The director told Graham that he'd been certain that the young evangelist would refuse the offer, but that in actually doing so Graham had restored DeMille's faith.
Among Cecil B. DeMille's most serious candidates for the role of Delilah were Jean Simmons, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth. In the case of the latter two actresses, their respective studios (MGM and Columbia) refused to loan them to Paramount.
At the premiere, Cecil B. DeMille asked Groucho Marx what he thought of the film. Groucho replied, "Well, there's just one problem, C.B. No picture can hold my interest where the leading man's tits are bigger than the leading lady's." DeMille was not amused, by Marx's remark, but Victor Mature apparently was.
Despite his physique, Victor Mature was a man of many fears and phobias. During the jaw-bone battle, the wind machine kicked up some particularly violent gusts, and the actor fled the sound stage for her dressing room, hiding in terror. According to Cecil B. DeMille biographer Charles Higham, the director publicly humiliated him using his megaphone to ensure that cast and crew all heard him. "I have met a few men in my time. Some have been afraid of heights, some have been afraid of water, some have been afraid of fire, some have been afraid of closed places. Some have even been afraid of open spaces - or themselves. But in all my thirty-five years of picture-making, Mr. Mature, I have not met a man who was 100 per cent yellow."
During the temple-destruction sequence, Henry Wilcoxon was struck by a falling column and approached Cecil B. DeMille with blood streaming down his face. According to biographer Charles Higham, DeMille remarked, " Good God, Harry, you look terrible; you're going to hold up production." Wilcoxen sardonically replied, "Well, I wouldn't be the first actor to be destroyed by a column."
For the scene in which Samson kills the lion, Victor Mature refused to wrestle a tame movie lion. Told by director Cecil B. DeMille that the lion had no teeth, Mature replied, "I don't want to be gummed to death, either." The scene shows a stunt man wrestling the tame lion, intercut with closeups of Mature wrestling a lion skin.
It took two tries to bring down the Temple of Dagon in the film's climactic sequence. During the first time, some of the dynamite charges in the miniature temple failed to go off on schedule. The temple (about one-third full size) had to be rebuilt, and the second attempt was more successful. Footage from both tries can be seen in the completed film: when the statue of Dagon starts to fall, there is a cut to the Saran saying "Delilah," then a cut back to a long shot of the statue hitting the ground, but at a slightly different angle from that of the previous shot.
With a $12 million gross domestically, this was the biggest hit Paramount had to date.