as Constituent Peter Sallis as M.P. Production The film was based on a novel by Labor politician Wilfred Fienburgh whose wife later said he wrote it over three months to "make some money". Fienburgh died in a car crash in February 1958 and the novel was published in early 1959. In February 1959 the BBC bought the rights to adapt the book for television. The book was serialised in a newspaper and became a best seller in England for several months. It was picked up for publication in the US. Film rights were bought by Sydney Box who hired Mordecai Richler to do the script and David Deutsch to produce. Richler said the original hope was for Jack Clayton to direct. However two weeks into Richler working on a script, Box had a heart attack and retired, and Deutsch moved on to another project. No Love for Johnnie transferred to Betty Box and Ralph Thomas. Box and Thomas had made the "Doctor" comedies for the Rank Organisation, and used this as leverage to get the studio to finance other projects, such as No Love for Johnnie. Ralph Thomas later said "we made that because we wanted to make it very much. We all loved it – Betty, myself, Peter Finch." Betty Box said she was "very surprised Rank let me do it... because they were very politically conservative as an organisation. Perhaps they liked the Peter Finch character being so corrupt because, after all, he was left-wing. I must say I liked it very much... I enjoyed making it very much. I loved working with Peter Finch. He was drunk some of the time, and not always very easy, but I was just very fond of him. Ralph and I both knew how to work with him." Filming started in August 1960. Ralph Thomas said "Peter managed to get everything that existed in that man [Fienburgh] on to the screen without ever having known him. People who knew Fienburgh really well identified Peter absolutely with the character." Music was by Malcolm Arnold, the score containing themes similar to those from Whistle Down the Wind, which he also scored the same year. Arnold produced music scores for more than a hundred films, among these The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), for which he won an Oscar. There is a brief appearance of a young Oliver Reed as a bohemian party-goer.