This was the first movie made by director Yasujirô Ozu after returning to Japan from his wartime army service abroad. After the surrender, he had been held for half a year in a British POW camp near Singapore, where he had been stationed. Legend has it that he was late in returning to Japan (in February 1946) because, although he was scheduled to be repatriated earlier, another Japanese soldier was desperate to go home, and Ozu let this other man go in his place.
Ozu was under extreme pressure by the studio to direct a film on short notice, and he claims that he wrote the entire screenplay for the film in only twelve days. He swore that he would never again allow himself to be forced to write a script so hurriedly, and he did not.
The film's English title is puzzling, since the protagonist of the film is not a "gentleman," but a woman. According to film scholar David Bordwell, the Japanese title "Nagaya shinshiroku" could also be translated as "A Who's Who of the Tenements."
About this little-known work, David Bordwell concludes, "If Ozu had made only this seventy-two minute film, he would have to be considered one of the world's great directors."
This film was voted the fourth-best movie of 1947 in the annual Kinema Junpo Japanese critics' poll.