Ambush (1950) was the last picture completed by Sam Wood, whose career stretched back to 1920. The Academy Award®-nominated director of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), Kitty Foyle (1940), and Kings Row (1942) finished work on this picture in September 1949 and was starting pre-production on No Sad Songs for Me (1950), starring Margaret Sullavan, when he was suddenly stricken with a heart attack in the offices of the Motion Picture Alliance, an organization he founded in 1944 to ferret out communists and their sympathizers in the film industry. Although known as an even-tempered and open-minded man for most of his life, Wood in his later years became increasingly vehement and conservative in his political activity, which his daughter, K.T. Stevens, said helped contribute to his death at the age of 65 on September 22, 1949.
Ambush (1950) was filmed on location at the Corriganville Ranch in Simi Valley, California, home of hundreds of western movies and television shows through the decades as well as such outdoor action films as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Jungle Jim (1948). Additional location work for Ambush took place in and around Gallup and Lupton, New Mexico.
The last of three films that both Robert Taylor and John Hodiak appeared in, the other two being Song of Russia (1944) and The Bribe (1949).
Ambush (1950) is not the first western Robert Taylor made; that distinction goes to Billy the Kid (1941), but it is his second, and the one that set him off on a string of oaters that sustained his career in later years. Following Ambush, Taylor made ten more westerns over the next 17 years, a dozen if you count the Argentine "cowboy" flick Savage Pampas (1965) and his two appearances on the TV series Hondo (1967), which were stitched together with other episodes to make the European release Hondo and the Apaches (1967). The genre was significant enough in his career to earn him induction into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1970, the year after his death.