The densely plotted Youth of the Beast takes off from a familiar arrangement of yakuza tropes—a hard-ass outsider with a hidden agenda ingratiates himself with a mob honcho—and quickly turns madcap, hurling at the screen an unfurling network of cops-turned-criminals and violent sociopaths, vengeful kingpins and their suspicious molls. Eventually, when the distinctions become more-or-less null, the brashness of Suzuki’s developing style takes precedent. Often cited as the occasion when the director’s growing impatience with Nikkatsu’s genre dictates hit an explosive breaking point, the film treats its pulp material as pretext for formal experimentation. Widescreen frames are loaded with almost too much detail to absorb, jagged splices of hard bop keep the film hurrying along like a Charlie Parker backing band, and sets call conspicuous attention to their own construction, especially one in which a wall in a yakuza lair is animated by a projection of a scene from another gangster movie.