The Bronx, 1963. Geographically close, but in reality we’re a long way from WEST SIDE STORY and its rival gangs the Jets and the Sharks. Here there’s a gang for every race, colour and hairstyle (The Wongs, The Mau-Mau, The Baldies and the terrifying Ducky Boys) but we focus on The Wanderers. These Italian kids in gold satin jackets strut through tenement alleys and cause mayhem in high school, instantly ready to rumble while following a code of ‘no guns, no knives’. This was the world brought to vibrant and visceral life by Richard Price (24 at the time) in his debut novel of the same name, and done full justice by Philip and Rose Kaufman in an adaptation that still manages to charm, touch and frighten, often in the same scene.

Episodic like the novel, the story follows Richie Gennaro (Ken Wahl) and his sidekicks, geeky but artistic Joey (John Friedrich) and flaky Turkey (Alan Rosenberg) who has a doomed desire to join the Baldies as they hang out by the Marines Recruiting Office. Led by the hulking Terror (Erland Van Lidth) and his punk girlfriend PeeWee (Linda Manz), the Baldies respond badly to Joey’s ridicule and exact revenge on him and Richie in a graphic punishment called ‘Cock and Rock’. Richie emerges in one piece, able to carry on his half-hearted romance with Despie Galasso (later Pussy’s wife Angie in THE SOPRANOS), closely monitored by her father Chubby (Dolph Sweet) who demonstrates how he and his fellow-Hawaiian shirted brothers mean business by the brutal way they deal with bowling-alley hustlers.

‘when you marry my daughter you’ll never wash a dish again’

But as the soundtrack reminds us, Richie is a Wanderer, with a roving eye, also an errant elbow for the purposes of ‘copping a feel’ from passing girls. But he tries it on once too often with Nina (Karen Allen, embodying the new spirit of women in the 60s with her guitar and copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover). Richie is smitten, Nina intrigued by this quaint throwback and they’re soon partying at the furious Despie’s house. In a strip poker scene that follows Kaufman achieves a level of close-up character performance that he would later bring to potentially unpromising material (the seven Mercury astronauts) in THE RIGHT STUFF.

As the world outside encroaches with the Kennedy assassination, glimpsed by Richie over the heads of a crowd watching outside the window of a TV shop, there’s a more immediate problem inside the Bronx – a football match to settle the high school feud, complete with betting organized by Chubby and Co and the connections of the Del Bombers aka ‘the coloureds’, the Wanderers’ opposition. When the game is sabotaged by hundreds of homicidal Ducky Boys, the dysfunctional community comes together to fight back; and they celebrate afterwards with a multi-cultural Italian meal, where Chubby tells Richie ‘‘when you marry my daughter you’ll never wash a dish again’.

This is enough to drive Richie out of the restaurant where he spots Nina and follows her to a folk club, where Bob Dylan is performing The Times They Are a Changin’. What’s a Wanderer to do? Return to the suffocating bosom of his Italian in-laws, or turn his back on the family and embrace the 1960s?

With its soundtrack never less than evocative, its sense of time and place and its well-judged performances, THE WANDERERS deserves better than its current ‘cult’ status and should take its place alongside other more celebrated coming-of-age movies like BREAKING AWAY, DINER and AMERICAN GRAFFITI.

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