Stated by cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa about director Yasujirô Ozu: "I'll never forget that, from the first day on, he knew the names of everybody on the set, fifty people in the crew, people he'd never worked with. He'd written their names down, I learned later. But everyone was impressed and became devoted to him. Every single day working on this film was extremely pleasurable and enriching. In each of Ozu's films you can sniff his personality. He was pure, gentle, light-hearted, a fine individual."
Roger Ebert, who provided the audio commentary on the 2003 Criterion DVD release, names this film as one of his ten all-time favorites.
Some subtitles have Kichinosuke, portrayed by Kôji Mitsui, jokingly calling himself Toshirô Mifune, despite giving his real name in the actual dialogue. Mitsui collaborated with Mifune on six Akira Kurosawa films: Scandal (1950), The Lower Depths (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), High and Low (1963), and Red Beard (1965).
An odd detail of the film is that the character of the protagonist, Komajuro, played by Ganjirô Nakamura, is never seen in those sequences in which the traveling theater troupe is shown performing onstage, despite the fact that Komajuro is the fictitious troupe's leading actor. This omission was deliberate. Yasujirô Ozu's concept was to depict the comic travails of a mediocre (at best) acting company. However, in real life Nakamura was a distinguished Kabuki performer. Therefore, he made it clear to the filmmakers that he would not allow any scenes in which his character was required to perform badly onstage. Similarly, one of the working titles of the film was (roughly translated) "The Ham Actor." Nakamura vetoed this title, for fear that audiences would assume that Ozu was referring to him.
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