The Wanderers
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Movie Reviews of The Wanderers
Movie Review: 1960'S ERA CULT CLASSIC
Summary: 5 Stars
The Wanderers is many things...an urban gang drama, juvenile comedy, changing of the times study and more. It works on all these levels and has become a certified cult classic. At it's core, the Wanderers is about the final death of the innocence of the 1950's. The Wanderers are an Italian gang in NY, still clinging to the last vestiges of the 1950's with their matching satin jackets and grease-backed hair. Early on several members run afoul of another gang, the notorious 'Baldies'. The Wanderers find themselves trapped until a newcomer, the huge Perry saves them and is immediately welcomed into the gang by their leader Richie (Ken Wahl).
The various members of the Wanderers have problems to deal with on their own. Richie has gotten his girlfriend, Despie, pregnant, Perry's mother is an Alcoholic, Turkey wants to join the Baldies and Joey has an abusive father who thinks his son doesn't measure up. The Wanderers have a verbal war with a black gang, the Del Bombers, in school and decide to settle things with an old-fashioned rumble.
When the Wanderers cannot get any other gangs to back them up, Despies father (Dolph Sweet) a neighborhood mob boss steps in and decides to stop the rumble and have the gangs settle their differences with a football game instead...with a lot of mob money riding on the outcome. The game climaxes when the two gangs, along with the rest in attendance, must join together to fight "The Ducky Boys", a group of vicious, seemingly homosexuals, who have crashed the game with hundreds of members.
Mixed in with the drama and action is a liberal amount of juvenile buddy comedy as the Wanderers 'accidently' bumb into women on the street in order to touch their breasts. This is how the meet Nina (karen Allen) a bohemian girl who Richie becomes infatuated with. There there are drunken parties, games of strip poker, etc. In one memorable scene, the drunken Baldies join the marines.
Through all of this is the theme of the changing of the times. The doo-wop of the 1950's is now being replaced by folk music. A poignant scene has Richie following Nina until she enters a club where (in sound anyway) Bob Dylan is playing. Richie doesn't enter as he seems to know that it's just not his world. The film also covers the assasination of John Kennedy as the symbolic death of innocence. It is this moment the galvanizes the strained relationship between Despie and Richie.
One wishes that the Ducky Boys had been better explained. They are a creepy group of men..older than the other gangs...who never speak and were actually seen taking Holy Communion in one part where Turkey enters their turf by mistake and his killed. What were the Ducky Boys representing? It's the one mystery of the film.
The Wanderers has a fantastic soundtrack of early 1960's hits including "Soldier Boy", "Walk Like a Man", "Runaround Sue", "Shout", "Big Girls don't Cry" and of course the title track.
This is a movie that holds up still after 25 years because it works well on so many different levels. This was mostly a cast of unknowns with Karen Allen perhaps being the most notable star a year after she did 'Animal House'. An enjoyable movie from beginning to end.
Movie Review: A Masterpiece Drama
Summary: 5 Stars
Set in the Bronx in 1963, The Wanderers focuses on the life of several young gang members coming of age. On it's surface The Wanderers may seem like nothing more than a sytlish little ditty. But watch closely and you'll find this movie is an existential masterpiece.
Ken Wahl plays Richie, the handsome and charismatic leader of The Wanderers gang. Ken juggles his friendships, loyalties, girlfriends, and struggles to maintain his Italian gang's position in the neighborhood. The Wanderers face threats from The Wongs (the Chinese gang), The Baldies (the greaser gang), an Irish gang and a black gang. But while all these gangs fight eachother, they fail to recognize the real threats to their ethnic enclave are the end of the decade and existential angst.
Always on the edge of this movie is the threat of the Duckie Boys gang. The movie never identifies the ethnic identity of the Duckie Boys. Instead the viewer experiences them as a silent and secret hoard of white men emerging from the fog with calm, placid and psychotic smiles on their faces. The Duckie Boys seem to number in the hundreds-a creepy mass of nameless individuals. In a pivitol scene, The Wanderers and the Blacks have gathered at a football field for a throwdown-they see the enemy in eachother. But on the edge of the field the Ducky Boys quietly gather, waiting to strike. Black, Italian and Chinese band together to fight this hoard of angry and psychotic white men which seem to represent urban America-the America that threatens to swallow them all, force them to assimilate and leave behind their ethnic identities.
The threat of the end of an era is cleverly disguised in Nina (Karen Allen), a hip and beautiful hippie chick. Richie is enthralled with her, but is bound to his Italian girlfriend. He feels Nina's pull and in a climatic scene they end up in the back of Richie's car and then are discovered. Ultimately Richie returns to his girlfriend and is forced to marry her. But Nina never really leaves his mind. We see Richie at his bachelor party and he glimpses Nina on the street. He follows her to a club where Bob Dylan (the real Bob Dylan according to the movie credits) is playing "The Times They Are A Changing". Richie doesn't go in to talk to her, returns to the bachelor party and is swallowed up by the Italians. Indications are he is going to be a "made man", married to the daughter of a mafioso but their way of life is ending. The 1970's are approaching. Nina will no doubt go on to be a hip east villager and Richie will settle into the role he is forced to play by life's circumstances, never entering modern society. We are left feeling like Richie's generation will be the last of it's kind.
This movie achieves violence without being violent. Viewers taste threat and never quite know where it is coming from. The characters and acting in this movie are superb. The plot is subtle and unique. It isn't your modern gang movie where drugs and guns and violence are the fireworks of an otherwise extremely dull movie.
Movie Review: "walk like a man, while crying like a teen angel"
Summary: 5 Stars
i saw the wanderers at an old theatre in my hometown in 1979, 5 years after reading richard price's book version and i thought it was one of the best movies ide seen since'the lords of flatbush' 5 years earlier.though not following the book version to closely,it still brought the book to vibrant life with all its stunning characters and violent yet heart felt situations.
'the wanderers' leader ritchie gennaro,best buddy joey capra,fellow wanderer buddy borsalino & hulking new wanderer perry lagaudia,played with crotch tugging zest by ken wahl,john friedrich,jim youngs and tony ganios respectively are excellent.
while there girlfriends,despie galasso & nina becker,played seductively by toni kalem and karen allen,are completely beautiful,while the tiny pee-wee,played with swaggering street smarts by linda manz,as the fordham baldies resident deb,is fantastic.
the gangs,'the wanderers','the fordham baldies','the wongs','the del bombers','the ducky boys',look great in their various gang regalia,from the wanderers gold satin jackets,to the fordham baldies obvious baldness,to the ducky boys sawed off runt look of grey and dirty clothes,they loook authentic as well as luridly dreamlike.
erland van lidthe dejaude,as terror the oversized leader of the fordham baldies is a standout and let us not forget alan rosenberg as the sicophant like turkey zukinni who ditched the wanderers for the fordham baldies ans screwed over his friends,is also amazing.
ken wahl shows a 50's teen idol appeal,while tony ganios does a fair stallonne rip-off as the ape with a heart of gold perry and toni kalem as despie the mob boss daughter puts in a stunning performence.
the opening sequence of the baldies chasing the wanderers through the back alleys of the south bronx,where there finally stomped royally and single handedly by the gigantic dimwitted robin hood like perry,is by far one of my favorites.
the soundtrack oozes cool and its a movie for anyone who recalls the good old days of tight chino slacks,greasey pompadores,girls wearing nylon hose w/t garters,push-up bras,black leather jackets,slick d.a's,do-wop,dion,big finned cars,bee-hive hair do's,cruizin' chicks,gang rumbles,turned up collars, they should definately enjoy this truelly wonderful movie.
enjoy fellow greasers,its a gassss!!!!
Movie Review: This movie has heart
Summary: 5 Stars
I love this movie.
It's one of the most honest ever made, even though it is a movie greatly inspired by nostalgia.
It has no particular agenda or view point, just a tremendous amount of warmth.
That warmth allows it to show urban street kid violence and racism, mafia brutality, and a host of poverty related social ills in a believable way, while still keeping the viewer sympathetic to almost every character and social group involved.
It does not do this by romanticising, it does this by keeping characters human.
There is one exception to this and that is the portrayal of the Ducky Boys - kids from a rival neighbourhood.
In sharp contrast to the other themes of rivalry in the movie, the Ducky Boys are shown to have no humanity at all and are one dimensional villians to such an extreme that it becomes surreal.
This is very deliberate.
Music, lighting and camera work all add to the nightmare quality the movie takes on every time these youths make an appearance.
Many people have a problem with this and see it as unrealistic and a weakness. I do not however.
As I said the movie is very much a work of nostalgia, honest though it is.
As such it has a general sense of heightened reality.
The movie shows the Ducky Boys as the protagonists perceived them.
The culmination of fear, ignorance and the real danger they represent makes them seem a shadowy nightmare enemy to the main characters.
I remember feeling the same way about some rival neigbourhoods during my own youth.
Boys that lived close enough so that conflict would occur from time to time, but far enough away so that there was absolutely no familiarity.
When you get older you realise that kids from one poor neigbourhood are pretty much like another.
When you are young however, though the dangers are in fact real, your sense of those dangers can be exaggerated to the point that other neighbourhoods seem forbidden and populated by inhuman murderers.
So for me the Ducky Boys are in fact one of the strongest elements of the Wanders.
I recommend this movie highly.
Movie Review: Wanderers Forever!
Summary: 5 Stars
The Wanderers came out in 1979, which was actually an amazing year for movies. Among the movies I have for that year in my collection are, Alien, the In Laws, Ten, North Dallas Forty, Breaking Away and of course, the reason the Wanderers was overlooked, the Warriors. Like the Wanderers, the Warriors was a gang movie set in New York, and both movies had their share of gang violence, but although both the Wanderers and Warriors share similar colors, there's where the similarity ends.
The Wanderers is a much deeper, much more fulfilling movie than the Warriors. The Warriors was the more violent movie, set more in contemporary times, while the Wanderers was set in 1963, when gangs were more like clubs than criminal enterprises. The Wanderers share their school with a myriad of gangs the Del Bombers, the Mau Maus, the Wongs, etc. And when they fight it's without guns or knives.
The Wanderers is a movie about the loss of innocence and the changing of the times, reflective of the period surrounding the Kennedy assasination. At the end of the movie Joey and Perry leave Richie's bachelor party and head to California, Richie himself goes for a breath of freah air and sees Bob Dylan playing folk music in a bar. Richie's fiance's father gives Richie an Hawiian shirt emblematic of his new membership with the "Sportsmen". The Fordham Baldies get drunk and get mass-recruited into the Marines. Everyone goes their seperate ways, each condemned in a way to a future they made with their choices.
The Wanderers is a fantastic movie, and not the least of it is the soundtrack, which is filled with great period songs including the eponymous The Wanderer by Dion which is obviously the gang's anthem. But the songs aren't forced on the movie, nor is the movie forced on the songs. They fit each other perfectly, like they were made for each other.
And that's the Wanderers in a nutshell, nothing over done, nothing under-treated, just a well-crafted masterpiece of a movie, where everything fits.