This Naruse film, that has its literary basis in the writings of Ishizaka Yojiro, is not a female-led melodrama set in the working-class neighborhoods of Japan's big cities, as you would expect from the director. Instead, we get a quiet, mundane country comedy made in the sunshine of the summer months. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We have seen the director succeed in similar lighter films before, such as "Tabi yakusha" (Traveling Actors, 1940). Rural, optimistic and life-embracing humor can work for the director, though he seldom chose to implement them in his films. This is not even a literary first for him, since Naruse had adapted Ishizaka before in "Magokoro" (Sincerity, 1939).
"Ishinaka sensei gyôjôki" (Conduct Report on Professor Ishinaka, 1950) is much too serious a name for this film. It makes you expect drama, and mostly, professor Ishinaka, both of which are sidelined in the production. The core merit is the charming presentation of the Japanese country-side in the film. It is very pleasant, appealing and welcoming and not forced as in some films of this sort.
The film itself is an anthology, divided in three parts. I find this solution to rarely work for comedies, because the narratives of the genre are light as it is, and shorter segments easily fail to establish proper characters, needed for the jokes to land. It's the case with this film as well. The stories themselves are not very interesting, and you can kind of see, that the film was split into three segments, because none of them could carry it alone. All of them take place in the same country village, all of them briefly feature the titular character, who serves as witness for the stories, and possibly writes them down (as movies?) - the adaptation part does not really make sense, you have to pretend you are watching a book. Considering he's the title character, he is not around much.
In the first segment, a young man walks to a house, and informs the family there, that as the war was ending, he buried gasoline containers in their field, so that the allied would not get their hands on them. People start to search for them, giving the boy time to romance the daughter of the house. In the second story, a traveling striptease show comes to town, and all of the men go watch it, causing shame for their adult children.
The final one is the most interesting for modern audiences, since it includes Mifune Toshiro. The actor, who made "Rashomon" (1950) that very year, received mostly rogue, villainous parts from the studio after his turn in Kurosawa's "Drunken Angel" (1948). His participation in this film seems like a conscious act of rebellion towards the screen image that he had established for himself. Mifune plays a shy, laconic country-boy, who accidentally takes a woman to his home farm, after she fell asleep in his hay-carriage. A fortune teller has told the woman, that she will meet her future husband within the next 24 hours.
None of the episodes is particularly good, but not one of them is downright terrible either. Naruse seems to be on a summer holiday, and he really needn't have filmed it, but since he did, the end result is a passable execution of mediocre material.
