Showing Off

By Frank Rich

THE WANDERERS Directed by Philip Kaufman Screenplay by Rose Kaufman and Philip Kaufman

The Wanderers is not just another urban gang movie; it is a little of every big, prominent gang movie made during the past two decades. Bits and pieces of this volatile film recall Clockwork Orange, Mean Streets, The Warriors and even West Side Story. Though the conflicting parts never mesh into a coherent whole, The Wanderers is always worth watching.

It contains more surprises than a walking tour of Times Square at 3 in the morning: you never know whether the intense activity will explode into violence, scatological humor or even sentimentality.

The film takes place in the North Bronx of 1963--a no man's land pockmarked by dilapidated apartment developments. The characters are the Italian American high school kids who belong to the Wanderers, a gang that is forever rumbling with black and Chinese rivals as well as with a grotesque bunch named the Fordham Baldies, led by the enormous Erland van Lidth de Jeude. Between the skirmishes, the movie charts typical teenage rituals. Even the Wanderers must cope, in their own semiverbal way, with parents, love, sex and the prospect of leaving home.

Working with an evocative period rock score and Michael Chapman's moody cinematography, Director Philip Kaufman brings off some colorfully overheated scenes: a vicious free-for-all on a football field, an erotic strip-poker game at a make-out party, a racial confrontation in a classroom. Sometimes the ten sion is flecked with humor. When the chief Wanderer (Ken Wahl) and his nebbishy sidekick (John Friedrich) get particularly horny, they go to hilariously elaborate lengths to press the flesh of neighborhood women. The laughs are crude, but in character.

The Wanderers' most vivid incidents come from its source, Richard Price's tough, anecdotal novel of the same title.

When Kaufman strays from the book, he gets into trouble. The female characters (well played by Karen Allen and Linda Manz) are blurred into ambiguity, seem ingly to create an idle air of mystery. By adding portentous references to the Kennedy assassination and the rise of Bob Dylan, Kaufman adds a little gratuitous sociology. The occasional stylization of the movie's violence is equally jarring: the gang members are at times so shrouded by theatrical smoke and shadow that they start to look like the pod people in Kauf man's Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Certainly a film maker is entitled to alter a novel's text, but here both the choices and the motives are somewhat spurious. By grafting stylistic affectations onto an otherwise naturalistic movie, Kaufman blunts the raw power that, is The Wanderers' greatest asset. Like his characters, he would have fared far bet ter if he had stopped showing off and practiced a little self-control.

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