When his widowed mother (Sarah Miles) falls in love with a sailor (Kris Kristofferson), a troubled young boy (Jonathan Kahn) is pressured by the bullying leader (Earl Rhodes) of his clique to seek revenge. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea is one of the stranger artifacts of the wide-open American cinema of the 1970s. The Japanese setting of Yukio Mishima's novel is transplanted to the English seaside, where an adolescent boy has fallen in with a group of pint-sized fascists (they call each other by numbers, not names). Meanwhile, the boy's mother (Sarah Miles) takes up with an ocean-wandering American seaman (Kris Kristofferson).