The career of the director of this film, Tomu Uchida, was in a very serious trouble at the time he made it. One of the most prominent Japanese filmmakers of the prewar period, Uchida, after failing to set up his own production company in the early 1940s, went to work for the Manchukuo Film Association in wartime occupied Manchuria, planning a film project that was never realized. After the war, he chose to remain for many years in China rather than return to Japan, apparently hoping in vain to make a film there. Thus, he did not return to Japan until late 1953, eight years after the end of the war and more than a decade after the release of his most recent film. However, his filmmaking friends from prewar days rallied round to help him return to the Japanese film industry. Uchida signed a contract with a new film studio, Toei, and was given this film as his first project, though it had originally been intended for Uchida's old friend Hiroshi Shimizu to direct. (Shimizu, along with Yasujirô Ozu and Daisuke Itô, were officially credited as "advisors to the production.") His comeback film turned out to be a big critical and commercial hit, and Uchida's postwar career was successfully launched.
The actor, Unpei Yokoyama, who plays the old father forced, due to poverty, to sell his young daughter Otane, played by Yuriko Tashiro, into prostitution, had a career going back literally to the dawn of Japanese cinema. In 1899, as an 18-year-old stage actor, he had played a policeman in a one-minute film, Pisutoru gôtô Shimizu Sadakichi (1899), now lost, depicting the apprehension of a notorious real-life criminal who had broken out of jail. Since this was the very first movie, other than brief recorded theatrical performances (such as kabuki plays or geisha dancing), ever made in Japan, Yokoyama was therefore one of the very first two Japanese film actors. (His co-star, Mokuko Ichikawa, who played the robber, apparently never made another film.) Yokoyama made hundreds of films before his retirement in 1962, and died in his home in 1967 at the age of 86.
The child actor, Motoharu Ueki, who plays the little orphan boy who hero-worships the spear carrier Gonpachi, as well as the child actress, Chie Ueki, portraying the shamisen player's daughter who performs a dance parodying Gonpachi, were both children of the film's star, Chiezô Kataoka, who plays Gonpachi.
Voted the eighth best film of 1955 by Japanese film critics in the annual poll conducted by Kinema Junpo magazine.
The actor Ryûnosuke Tsukigata appears both in this remake and in the original 1927 version of the film, titled Dochu hiki (1927). Presumably, Tsukigata in the 1927 film portrayed the same role played in this film by Chiezô Kataoka, but this cannot be verified, as the earlier film is missing and presumed lost.