The Vicious Breed

Juvenile delinquent classic filled with brawls, booze and sex. The tough young gangster Myggan (“The Mosquito”) escapes from juvenile prison, heading straight for trouble.
What follows is a breathless catalogue of bad decisions: a stolen gun from a military depot, a string of burgled summer houses, a crashed car, a shot police officer, and a girlfriend driven to prostitution to keep them both alive. The newspapers call him the “Valla Desperado”. The censors called the whole thing "a speculation in cynicism" and tried to ban it outright. They lost—though they did carve out four minutes before letting it through.

First-time director Arne Ragneborn was twenty-nine years old and apparently had no interest in making anything polite. His debut is lean, mean, and genuinely uncomfortable—a juvenile delinquent film that earns its genre credentials without winking at the audience. Ragneborn would go on to make four more features in rapid succession, consistently drawn to desperate youth, alcohol, violence and the jagged edges of the Swedish dream, and consistently locking horns with the censors along the way.

The film was restored by the Swedish Film Institute.