[2] The supporting cast includes Dina Merrill, Shelley Winters, and Edward Andrews, and The Young Savages was the first film featuring Telly Savalas, who plays a police detective, foreshadowing his later role as Kojak.

Two Italian-American greasers, Danny diPace and Anthony "Batman" Aposto, and the Irish-American Arthur Reardon are members of a street gang named the Thunderbirds in New York City's East Harlem.

They are caught and arrested, and during questioning by the police, assistant district attorney Hank Bell discovers one of the boys is the son of Mary diPace, an ex-girlfriend.

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 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.