This was the first film made by star actress Kinuyo Tanaka after her triumphant months-long visit to the United States. Allegedly, Tanaka, from her recent contacts with Hollywood actors, was full of new ideas about acting, which she was not shy about sharing with her director, Ozu. The latter, who held his own very strong (and very un-Hollywood) ideas about acting, was reportedly not pleased by this, and relations between the two during filming were thus somewhat tense.
Although conceived as a star vehicle for actress Kinuyo Tanaka, the actor Sô Yamamura, playing the heroine's unemployed, alcoholic husband, was the only member of the cast to receive an award for his work on the film, being chosen as Best Actor of 1950 by the Blue Ribbon Awards and also (confusingly) as Best Supporting Actor of 1950 by the Mainichi Film Concours.
Voted the seventh best Japanese film of 1950 in the annual critics' poll held by Kinema Junpo film magazine.
This is the first of only three films that director Yasujirô Ozu made for a Japanese studio other than his "home" studio, Shochiku. (The two other Ozu movies for non-Shochiku studios were Abschied in der Dämmerung (1959) (Daiei) and his penultimate film, Der Herbst der Familie Kohayagawa (1961) (Toho).) Shintoho (literally "New Toho") had recently been founded by a group of ex-Toho actors in the aftermath of the bitter strikes that beset the latter studio in the late 1940s. Though the new studio had many stars, it had few star directors, so it was willing to temporarily lure Ozu away from Shochiku with the promise of a bigger budget than any previous Japanese production: 50 million yen (about $140,000 in 1950 dollars, or about a million-and-a-half 2020 dollars).
This is the only Ozu film based on a serialized novel (written by Jirô Osaragi). It was a common practice in Japanese cinema at the time to adapt such novels for the screen. The director later recalled that he found the process of adaptation difficult. His usual practice was to create original scripts (invariably with his screenwriting partner Kôgo Noda after 1948), so he could tailor those scripts to specific actors he had in mind for the various characters. However, since the characters from the novel already existed, Ozu had to find actors to fit a conception that was not his, and he found this to be a challenge. This circumstance may be one reason why this film is one of the least well-regarded of Ozu's postwar films.