In the climactic prison uprising, Barbara Rhoades is last seen wearing a corset (with amply jiggling cleavage), a decorative hat and one elbow-length glove. However, interviews with Rhoades, and an actress who'd turned down the role, reveal that the scene went further and Rhoades ended up fully nude. Rhoades said she didn't realize her scene would be so "explicit" until the day of shooting. She just did what the director told her to do and kept taking off clothes until she was running around totally naked. Her character reportedly flees "after her clothes are torn off in a prison scene and she races across the desert in her birthday suit". At least two still photos (apparently from the movie) support that. They show her wearing the same hat and elbow-length glove mentioned above. One image shows her topless from the waist up and the second shows her full figure nude. She said Playboy asked her to do a pictorial at that time based on that scene but she refused. She also hinted that she was fine with the nudity being edited out of the movie. She revealed that while she had no problem being totally naked in front of the cast and crew, she didn't want photos or footage floating around the rest of her life. Eileen O'Neill was offered the role but turned it down. "When I read the script, my character is ravaged by the revolting prisoners and they tear her clothes off. She then had to run nude from the prison to an outside area lit with floodlights." She added that her career went nowhere after that and wondered if she should have taken the role after all, especially since they ended up cutting out the nudity. Even co-star Michael Blodgett "excitedly" told Hollywood gossip columnist Marilyn Beck, "It's a prison story, wild and new . . . man, such nudity!" Why the explicit nudity was deleted is unexplained, and the footage is presumed lost. By today's standards, what remains is fairly tame: a couple glimpses of the bare backside of Kirk Douglas, a glimpse of a bare breast here and there and some mildly risqué drawings. Promoted as a "cynical western," the film was released on Christmas Day 1970. It did poorly at the holiday box office. Maybe a totally nude Rhoades would have changed that.

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