That was an excellent one.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I have watched this movie at least 50 times. It is my all time favorite movie. I just mailed my DVD copy (I have VHS also)last week to friends in Santa Barbara. I spoke to them this afternoon and they told me they loved it. My friends wife adores Ken Wahl. When The Wanderers was first released I went to every movie house and Drive-In it was playing at and took a different friend each time. The only person that didn't like this movie was my wife at the time. I even have the soundtrack on 8-track tape. A few songs in the movie were not on the released soundtrack, ie, I Love You by the Volumes. I have also read the book written by Richard Price who appears in the movie as one of the bowling sharks, the one with the mustache. The book is a very good read but does not follow very close to the movie.

The Wanderers Is one of the most underrated,overlooked movies of all time and a classic of gang films,teen films and coming-of-age films and one of my all time favorite movies.Based on Richard Price's novel and set In 1963 Bronx,New York, The Wanderers tells the story of an Italian gang called The Wanderers focusing on three members of the gang Richie(Ken Wahl),the leader of the gang,Joey(John Friedrich),the hyperactive little guy In the gang who lives with an abusive Father and Perry(Tony Ganinos),the gentile giant who's new In town and joins The Wanderers and Is a neighbor of Joey's. The three characters along with The Wanderers deal with love, growing up, changing of the times, and rival gangs such as the all-black gang The Del-Bombers, the bald headed gang The Fordham Baldies, an Asian gang called The Wongs and probably the scariest gang of them all The Ducky Boys a group of small guys who are silent,but come in large numbers.The Wanderers Is a great film from beginning to end and will stay with you after you watch it because it's funny,tragic,nostalgic,haunting and unforgettable. The film is funny because of the way it depicts teenage life for The Wanderers in the early 60s,whether it's picking up girls,going to parties,or getting in fights with other gangs. The music fashions,style and the way the characters act seems true to what was going on at the time and they're definitely is a realism to it. The film is like a great mixture of George Lucas' American Graffiti,Walter Hill's The Warriors and Barry Levinson's Diner all in one. The film also paints a world where every teenager in the Bronx is in a gang and all of the gangs are different by race like the all Italian gang (The Wanderers),a Asian gang(The Wongs) Black gang(The Del-Bombers),Bald gang(The Baldies),a silent gang(The Ducky Boys). The way the gangs are shown in the movie is exaggerated,funny,surreal and at times scary but also unique. The film has an episodic nature where some scenes aren't connected to one another and sometimes character tend to disappear,but there isn't a wasted scene in the film and the movie has a great energy and flow. Some of the scenes will have meaning and will stick with you after you finish. Like the best Teen films or Coming Of Age films The Wanderers is a film about dealing with the last grasps of being a teenager and facing the tough challenges of being an adult,where the characters face the fact that they're not going to be teenagers or in a gang forever,or it's dealing with life teenage and other relationships,parents or an uncertain future. This is one of the reasons why The Wanderers sets itself apart from other gang films. Like American Graffiti,The Wanderers is about the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s where the innocence and fun of the late 50s was being replaced by the dark times of the 60s. The characters especially Richie,Joey and Perry know that the times are changing faster than they and they're is a bunch of powerful moments in the film that give way to the changing of the era's and will stick with you after the film is over. The film moves at a solid pace and at times feels like a 90 minute film than a 117 minute film with great energy and break neck speed. Although The Wanderers is not an Action film they're a couple of fight scenes in the film that are well done and brutal and add to the greatness of the film. I know people have been comparing The Wanderers and The Warriors and trying to say which film is better,stop comparing them. As someone who owns and loves both films they both shouldn't be compared,The Wanderers is coming of age Comedy-Drama,The Warriors is an Action film,the only thing they have in common is that they're both gang films. Both are classic films and shouldn't be compared. The ending of the film is beautiful,sad,tragic and at the same time optimistic and will make the viewers make up their minds about what happened to the characters. A great ending.The whole cast does a great job. Ken Wahl does a great job as Richie,the leader of The Wanderers. John Friedrich is wonderful as the hyperactive Joey. Tony Ganios is wonderful as Perry,the gentle giant who's new in the neighborhood and becomes a member of The Wanderers. Karen Allen does a great job in her small role as Nina,a girl Richie and Joey meet. Toni Kalem does a fine job as Despie,Richie's girlfriend. Alan Rosenberg is funny as Wanderers' weasel Turkey. Jim Youngs does a great job as Buddy,a ladies man. Erland Van Lidth is excellent as Terror leader of The Baldies. Linda Manz is outstanding as PeeWee Terror's girlfriend. Dolph Sweet gives a memorable performance as Chubby,Despie's father and a local gangster who helps The Wanderers out when needed. William Andrews frightening and intense as Emilio,Joey's abusive Father.Director Philip Kaufman does a masterful job Directing the film moving the camera when ever he can, never slowing down. Kaufman's direction gives the film a since of edge and realism and at times creepiness. A year before in 1978 Kaufman directed the great remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers a creepy and terrifying film and Kaufman brings the same terrifying tone in this film with The Ducky Boys scenes. The soundtrack is amazing with great songs like Walk like a man,Soldier Boy,Baby It's you,The Wanderer,Stand By Me and many more. The soundtrack greatly fits with the tone of the late 50s and early 60s. In final word,if you love Gang films,teen films,Coming of age films and love films like The Warriors,The Outsiders,Rumble Fish and American Graffiti or cinema in general,I highly suggest you see this underrated classic. Highly Recommended. 10/10.

I first saw this movie at a drive in theater when I was in college back in the late 1970's.I liked it but didn't think much about it for a long time. Recently I caught it again and realized what a thoroughly good movie it was.Never mind the setting or time period. If you ever felt any teen-age angst, or if you ever felt a part of anything bigger than you, this is a movie that you can relate to.The soundtrack is good if you like early 1960's music. But to me this was incidental.Powerful performances propel this movie, although the ending is a bit strange. All of the acting is A-1 in my book.

Philip Kaufman's "The Wanderers" opens with a couple kissing on a couch. He wants to have sex, but she doesn't. "You're a guy," she says, worried about getting pregnant. "Guy's don't have to worry about their reputations!"Kaufman undermines her proclamation by immediately cutting to a shot of skinhead gang members gathering on a street corner, "Walk Like A Man" playing on the soundtrack. As the film progresses, Kaufman will use this scene (a horde of gangsters standing outside a military recruiting station, trying to recruit new members of their own) as a jumping off point to delve into such issues as loyalty, sex, racial tension, adolescent swagger and the pros and cons of machismo. In other words, the film is about guy's worrying about their status and reputations within their own little communities.More importantly, though, Kaufman takes this theme (male identity under threat) and then builds a sequel to his earlier picture, "Invasion of The Body Snatchers", creating a film which is more about migration, movements and group formation.The film's two main protagonists are Richie, leader of a gang called the Wanderers, and Joey, a kid with artistic aspirations. As the film unfolds, we watch as the various boys and men of the picture form cliques, join gangs and jump from one group to the next, always seeking the solace and protection that these ready made support-groups offer. All these gangs assemble at the end of the film, where they face off on a giant football field. The blacks, the Italians, the Chinese, the mafia, the sons, the fathers, all gather on the field, all in their own little testosterone filled groups, waiting for any excuse to release their rage. When that violent moment comes, however, they target not one another, but a ghostly group of men called "The Duckies", a seemingly phantasmic gang which Kaufman bathes in smoke and treats as a kind of supernatural force; even oppositional groups join forces to curb anxieties.After this multi-gang orgy, in which every creed and race teams up to defeat the spectral "Duckies", Kaufman undercuts the testosterone and exposes the normalcy of gang life. Scoring sex leads to dull marriages, acting tough leads to dead end jobs in the military, violence and machismo masks weakness and anxieties, gang peer pressure leads to death etc etc. By the film's end, everyone – despite their macho rebellion - is trapped in a future that's a conformist, carbon copy of the past. All except Joey, the artist who – like the artist character at the end of George Lucas' similar film, "American Graffiti" – jumps in a car and skips town. Don Siegel's 1956 film, "The Invasion of The Body Snatchers", dealt with a hostile group of aliens who sought to take over a small Californian town. The film used a "cultural invasion" from outer space to symbolise the annihilation of free personality in contemporary society.Kaufman's 1978 remake, however, saw "cultural invasion" as a blend of what sociologist Robert Park calls "migrations" and "passive movements". Migration as a mass movement usually entails a certain amount of cultural conquest (economic or political) and assimilation, whereas passive movements represent a more individualised negotiation of cultural boundaries within a society (in Kaufman's invasion film, the humans have to act like aliens who are themselves acting like humans, in order to survive. IE, conformity is itself a kind of parody of a fake humanity). In Don Siegel's film, actor Kevin McCarthy stumbles out onto a rural street and yells "They're here!", warning townsfolk of the alien invasion. In Kauffman's remake, the same Kevin McCarthy finds himself bumbling down a busy urban street, again yelling "They're here!"The relocation of the alien invasion from rural town to urban mega-city marks an important shift. By placing the alien invasion within a metropolitan centre the sharp distinctions between ethnic groups (blacks, Irish, Italian, Japanese, American, Commie etc) are down played while the question of the individual as Other within the large, alienating convolutions of the modern landscape takes precedence. In the modern world, individuality as a means of defining oneself against any number of groups becomes lost within the ubiquitous streamlining of social, ethnic, and religious differences, everyone essentially becoming the same in their differences.In Kaufman's next film, "The Wanderers", he again has a character yelling "They're here!", this time when the virus-like "Duckies" appear. Set against the changing nature of ethnic communities within the Bronx, the racial tensions of the film are resolved not by all the different races battling against one another in order to survive, but in the races "coming together" against an external, seemingly ghostly contaminant. Here it is conformity – the very alien behaviour that the humans rallied against in "Body Snatchers" – that allows the various gangs to band together and fight off the foreign invaders.Kauffman stresses that it is the basic values that the different gangs share (codes, morals, symbols, colours, lack of weapons etc), that allow them to identify with one another and band against the invading "Duckies". The "Duckies" themselves are perhaps a stand in for America's Vietnamese or foreign enemies, which Kaufman sees as a ghostly sham, a boogie man used to whip up home-grown fear.Why are the gangs so easily whipped up into fear? Because they all agree on boundaries to define themselves in relationship to other ethnic/racial groups. "The Duckies", however, refuse to acknowledge these basic values. They, like the aliens from "Body Snatchers", are an external social force that does not distinguish between race, ethnicity and religion, and are therefore threatening to the supposedly "distinct" and "anti establishment" (ie hypocritical) gangs, solely because of their non conformity.8.5/10 – Kaufman's use of surfing music predates "Pulp Fiction". Worth two viewings.