The Baldies, ruled by overweight strongman Terror (Erland van Lidth), are mostly here for comic relief, although we do work up sympathy for Terror's underaged butch girlfriend, PeeWee (Linda Manz), and for Turkey (Alan Rosenberg) a confused schmuck whose loyalties are drifting from the Wanderers to the Baldies.
But our protagonists are the Wanderers, and their coming-of-age antics. Patrolling their territory must be done in style. This means any unaccosted attractive young woman walking down the street is subject to "accidental" physical contact. Predictable comic protests follow, but since Richie is a dreamboat, his turn at elbow molestation results lands him a hottie new girlfriend, Nina (Karen Allen). Problem is, Richie already has a girlfriend, Despie (Toni Kalem), and her father is a powerful mobster.
How others will see it. Karen Allen is best known for Raiders of the Lost Ark and Animal House, but fans of her lithe screen presence should take note of a strip poker scene, which also features slender hottie Toni Kalem two decades before her Sopranos days.
How I felt about it. Like American Graffiti or Grease, The Wanderers is a nostalgia comedy. The rock'n'roll oldies soundtrack works, just as it did for American Graffiti, and is certainly better than the mediocre faux oldies that made so much money for the Grease producers. The comedy works because it all seems so innocent, despite the occasional murder, assault, and mob shakedown.
If you pine for the days (that allegedly once existed) when boys were boys and girls were girls, here you have them, PeeWee's androgynous look excepted. The boys patrol their territory, while the girls hang out in safe zone houses, sometimes with their boyfriends. Nobody seems to be having sex, but there's plenty of wishing, flirting, smoking, and drinking. What's absent are the parents, with the exception of Joey's testosterone-topped dad and Despie's Mafia potentate father.
Director/writer Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) implies the era of the Italian-American street gang was ending in 1963. Members are moving away from New York, sent to Vietnam, or even passing over Four Seasons singles in favor of Bob Dylan albums. The real question is the degree to which it ever existed in the first place. Was the Italian-American New York City presence a youth gang, or a community? It was, and is, the latter.