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,
Seven Samurai (1954), which placed third. In addition, the film that topped the poll that year was another Kinoshita work, the classic
Twenty-Four Eyes (1954). (Kinoshita died in 1998, the same year as Kurosawa.)