An early film from Philip Kaufman who went on to direct the likes of The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Though less lauded than the broadly similar American Graffiti, and more variable in its tone and quality (it's a bit episodic), this tale of the high-school life of a bunch of Italian-American kids in New York's Bronx in the early 1960s remains thoroughly entertaining. Indeed, in some quarters it has become something of a retro cult fave. Of its stars (Ken Wahl, Karen Allen, John Friedrich), only Allen really went on to bigger if not necessarily better things, playing the love interest in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Starman.

The streets of the Bronx are owned by '60s youth gangs where the joy and pain of adolescence is lived. Philip Kaufman tells his take on the novel by Richard Price about the history of the Italian-American gang ‘The Wanderers.’