Leif Panduro's novel Traditions, My Behind was a sensation among Danish youth of the 1950s in a similar fasion to American J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye which appeared at about the same time. This movie is based on Panduro's well-loved tale. In the story, David is an upper-class teen whose response to his discovery of the overwhelmingly offensive hypocrisy which surrounds him is to bite the offender's thighs, or simply to kick them on the backside. His uncomprehending mother immures him in a psychiatric nursing home. There, he endures the meandering platitudes of the psychiatrist and befriends a genuinely mad old fellow. The madman, who is highly paranoid, and David, amuse themselves by tossing around small bombs.