The Wanderers

A film set in the Bronx in 1963. The Wanderers are the neighbourhood's Italian-American high school gang. They are not a serious criminal organisation; they have jackets, they have a name, and they fight other gangs. There are other groups around and every neighbourhood belongs to a community. Richie is their leader. He is seeing a girl and she becomes pregnant; her family is connected to the mob and marriage becomes unavoidable. Joey is a boy who is beaten at home and afraid of his father. What the film is interested in is these groups breaking up. Throughout there is a sense of a period closing: draft letters arrive, marriages begin, and one November day the news comes over the radio. The register keeps shifting: broad comedy, teen film, then suddenly a dark scene. The best-known sections are those with a gang called the Ducky Boys; the narrative builds them almost as a supernatural threat. The music is made of period records and is part of the story. The source is Richard Price's novel. Philip Kaufman directed. It became a cult item later and is counted among the known examples of the neighbourhood gang story. An interesting production for anyone who likes films about youth and 1960s America. For a viewer expecting an orderly narrative, it proceeds loosely and the shifts in register are abrupt.