The Bribe was the first of three films at MGM which teamed Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner (The other two were Ride, Vaquero! and Knights of the Round Table, both 1953). It was an arrangement that pleased Ms. Gardner enormously, as recounted in her biography, Ava: My Story: "Set on some fictitious island off the coast of Central America, which looked suspiciously like Mexico on MGM's all-purpose backlot. 

While Gardner didn't win any prizes for her performance as the deceptive Elizabeth Hintten in The Bribe, almost everyone agreed she looked ravishing, despite her heavy partying off-camera. On the other hand, Robert Taylor, long stereotyped by MGM as their reigning matinee idol, was finally developing into a first rate actor who would go on to give his best performances in film noirs like Rogue Cop (1954) and Party Girl (1958). The Bribe was an important step in this direction, establishing Taylor as a hard-boiled, cynical hero but he wasn't at all fond of the film. He confessed to Gardner that he thought it "was one of the worst movies he'd ever made."

Ironically, the tough dialogue and sleazy underworld characters of The Bribe - usually the province of macho mystery writers like Dashiell Hammett - were created by Marguerite Roberts, who usually wrote screenplays specifically for MGM's major male talent like Clark Gable. Unfortunately, Roberts was very much the bohemian radical and her politics got her into serious trouble in the fifties. She was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee in September 1951 and refused to cooperate. Consequently MGM terminated her contract and her name was removed from the screen credits of Ivanhoe, her final film for the studio

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