Susumu Hani brought a revolutionary dimension to Bad Boys-a story of young delinquents in a reform school (in Japan, as elsewhere, a euphemism for boys' prison)-by employing a cast of non-professional actors, boys who in fact had served time at the school and were persuaded to reconstruct their lives for him in a fictional context. Hani provided only indirect direction; the boys filled in the dialogue, the story, and ultimately the meaning. Among many extraordinary sequences are an armed robbery, an unvarnished case of bullying, a wonderful and weird scene in which the boys troop down to the shore of their island prison to harass passing ships. The result is a study in what Hani calls "the spirit of totalitarianism, which is still deeply rooted in modern Japanese behavior...even those delinquents who revolt against society behave like their feudalistic fathers." But the filmmaker captures this with a unique sensitivity to the inner being of his subjects; using a hand-held camera and, often, a wide lens he creates the sense not only that "these boys (are) in their own world" but also that "they are sometimes very soft, very tender, very delicate, very naive." Hani, the son of a prominent historian/philosopher, was himself a "bad boy" ("I was completely disturbed by teachers and teachers completely disturbed by me," he recalls); but unlike François Truffaut, he was later educated in a radical "free school." He earned acclaim for a series of artistic and perceptive documentaries, including Children Who Draw and Horyuji Temple (the latter is shown July 20) before becoming the first director of the Japanese New Wave to win mainstream critical favor and the Best Picture award for 1961 with Bad Boys. (Hani quoted in Film Comment, Spring '69.)