Like his pre-New Wave predecessors whose work we highlight this month, Masahiro Shinoda, one of the most versatile of the New Wave directors, used genre to his own purposes. Whether in stately period dramas like Double Suicide or the energetic gangland sagas, Tears on the Lion's Mane, Pale Flower and Killers on Parade, Shinoda consistently explored the theatrics of life in a society in which honor and loyalty are so deeply rooted as to function as a nearly classic notion of fate. His yakuza films play out their own demise against the failure of traditional values (on which even this modern gangster mode is based). Tears on the Lion's Mane, Shinoda's eighth film, was one of several collaborations with the young poet (and later, filmmaker) Shuji Terayama and the composer Toru Takemitsu. Set against the Yokohama waterfront, it is a portrait of the suppressed passions and violence of youth, painted in the vital strokes of the New Wave: "melodrama and poetry, blood and politics, rock'n'roll" (Edinburgh Film Festival). The "lion" of the title is a young dockworker (Takashi Fujiki) who tries to break up a strike out of a misguided sense of loyalty to his crooked boss, a would-be father figure whom he believes saved his life, becoming disabled in the effort. When Fujiki, consumed with rage at the discovery of a lifelong betrayal, picks up his guitar and begins to wail, the effect is grotesque, comic, and strangely moving.