"Flamingo Road" was originally intended as a vehicle for Ann Sheridan, who turned down the role played by Joan Crawford. Sheridan felt the script was poor and it was not faithful to the book it was based upon.
Famed German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder often named this film as one of his ten favorites, praising director Michael Curtiz as "cruelly overlooked". Curtiz was often cited as one of his greatest influences, and the opening scene of this film is "homaged" in the opening of Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends (1975).
The interior set of a passenger train seen here also was used in several other Warner Brothers films of the period, among them was Horse Trick Riders (1895)'s Strangers on a Train (1951) and the The Photographical Congress Arrives in Lyon (1895) comedy It's a Great Feeling (1949).