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The World of Henry Orient was filmed and released in 1964, with Peter Sellers -- a newly minted star from The Pink Panther and Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb -- as Henry Orient. The casting of Sellers, which was inspired, threatens in retrospect to classify this film as the proverbial "Sellers comedy," which it is not. It is actually a breezy, charming coming-of-age story, directed by George Roy Hill, featuring two new young actresses, Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker, as the heroines Gil and Val.

A box office hit, The World of Henry Orient was nominated for the Golden Globe as the year's Best Film (Musical or Comedy) and Sellers also won a Golden Globe nomination for his performance. In the Film Daily poll of the nation's critics, Sellers' performance was among the top five cited. Tippy Walker won the poll for Best Juvenile Actress, with Merrie Spaeth as one of the runners-up. Nora Johnson adapted her own novel with the collaboration of her father, the legendary writer/director/producer Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the screenplays for The Grapes of Wrath and How to Marry a Millionaire. Hill established himself as an important emerging director with this film, and he went on to direct Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Slaughterhouse Five and The Sting, for which he won the Oscar.

In addition to Sellers and the two young actresses, the cast of The World of Henry Orient features Paula Prentiss, Angela Lansbury, Tom Bosley, Phyllis Thaxter, Bibi Osterwald and -- in a small role -- Al Lewis, later known as "Grandpa Munster."