Kinoshita's response to the mid-fifties taiyozoku (sun-tribe) films about nihilistic youth was a cut apart and above, stylish and literary, and showing a problem whose roots are deep in the postwar moment. Kiyoshi, the son of a widowed servant who makes paper flowers to make ends meet, loses himself in a fast crowd of would-be gangsters. But he is continually drawn by the pull of his mother's sorrow, his late sainted father (actually a black marketeer), and the family's poverty. Mother and her memories are an anchor for his self-hatred and a springboard for his violence. The son of her wealthy employers takes an interest in him, like a spider toward a fly, and he becomes entwined in the machinations of a Sirkian Western-style household run on secrets and sexual innuendo. As in its Hollywood counterpart Rebel Without a Cause, it's about the parents, whether poor and long-suffering or rich and oblivious. Postwar youth wear their elders' experience, which they will never understand, like a rose tattoo. (JB)