The Young Savages

Plot

Danny diPace (Stanley Kristien), Arthur Reardon (John Davis Chandler) and Anthony "Batman" Aposto (Neil Nephew) are members of a street gang named the Thunderbirds in New York City in East Harlem. They have an ongoing turf war with a Puerto Rican gang called the Horsemen. The three Thunderbirds unleash a knife attack on Roberto Escalante (José Pérez), a blind member of the Horsemen and stab him to death. They are caught and arrested, and during questioning by the police, assistant district attorney Hank Bell (Burt Lancaster) discovers one of the boys is the son of Mary diPace (Shelley Winters), an ex-girlfriend.

Back at the office of the district attorney Dan Cole (Edward Andrews), Bell admits he knows the mother of one of the suspects in the killing. Despite objections, he is not taken off the case and admits that he grew up in the same neighborhood. In a conversation with his wife Karin (Dina Merrill), Bell admits that his father changed his name from Bellini (Belani in the book) to Bell because he wanted to conceal his background and where he grew up, a deception Bell had found advantageous in pursuing his career and marrying a Vassar girl. At the funeral for Roberto Escalante, Bell is confronted by his ex-lover who tells him that her son promised he would never join a gang. Bell then sets out to find the facts about the killing, meeting one by one with all the families and gang members involved. He learns not only the intricacies of the case, but is shocked at his own capacity to kill when he is attacked by a gang, making him realize his hard-won character in the school of hard knocks is not immune to these forces. From a different angle, illustrating the limitations of a privileged education and upbringing, his wife finds her idealistic empathy for those caught in a web of circumstance is challenged when she is attacked by gang members in an elevator.

The drama evolves to consider many aspects of the crime: gangs, poverty, ethnic bias, parental incapacity to deal with forces far beyond their control, and politics. The three boys tried for the murder illustrate how personal qualities of morality, mental capacity, conformity, and psychosis fit into a squalid ethnically diverse setting compartmentalized by demeaning stereotypical beliefs. The milieu in which all life is on trial, including not only the perpetrators' surroundings, but the failure of larger society to take much interest in the underlying issues. When the trial concludes with different sentences for each boy tailored to their natures, the mother of the victim asks Hank Bell accusingly if justice had been served, and Bell answers unhappily that a great many people bear a responsibility for her son's death.

Cast