By all rights, Saura's first film, The Hooligans, should have been the manifesto and spearhead of a "Spanish New Wave"; the scandal of Viridiana, however, and the film's "preordained" (through government meddling) box office failure quickly put an end to the aspirations of an emerging generation of film school-trained directors. Following the exploits of a teenage gang who plan a burglary of a large factory in order to finance the bullfighting career of a friend, Saura creates a hard-edged look at a rapidly modernizing Spain as seen from the bottom up. Much of the camerawork is hand-held, giving the film a striking, almost visceral kind of immediacy. Richard Peña