This film is often compared to the prewar German film Jeunes filles en uniforme (1931) by Leontine Sagan, which had also used the setting of an overly strict girls' school to criticize a society viewed as rigid and authoritarian.
The director of this film, Keisuke Kinoshita, was regarded by both critics and the public as being engaged in an ongoing professional rivalry with his good friend Akira Kurosawa, because, among other reasons, both filmmakers had directed their debut films in the same year, 1943. (It was Kinoshita who won the Best New Director prize for that year.) In the Best Ten critics poll held by the cinema magazine Kinema Junpo for films released in 1954, this film placed second, beating Kurosawa's most ambitious film up to that time, Les 7 Samouraïs (1954), which placed third. In addition, the film that topped the poll that year was another Kinoshita work, the classic Vingt-quatre prunelles (1954). (Kinoshita died in 1998, the same year as Kurosawa.)
In the film, several characters make much of the fact that the most radical of the rebellious students, Akiko, comes from a wealthy, aristocratic family. In real life, the actress who plays Akiko, Yoshiko Kuga, did, in fact, have such a background. Kuga's father had been a marquis under the old hereditary peerage system before that system was abolished after the war by the Allied Occupation, and she had attended the exclusive (and expensive) Gakushuin Girls' Junior High School (an institution strongly identified with the imperial family), where she had been discovered and signed to a film contract in the 1940s.
The actress Mieko Takamine who plays the (presumably middle-aged) matron of the girls' school, the equivalent of headmistress, was only about five years older than the film's star, Hideko Takamine (no relation), who portrays Yoshie, one of the school's teenage students.