Coppola: The Outsiders (1983)

In some ways, The Outsiders occupies an unusual position in Francis Ford Coppola’s body of work. On the one hand, it feels a bit like his first effort at a moderate or small-scale film following the string of mission statements that stretched from The Godfather to One From The Heart. In keeping with that movement away from auteurist ambition, it’s also the first film in nearly a decade that wasn’t at least co-written by Coppola, with screenwriter Kathleen Rowell adapting S.E. Hinton’s iconic novel about coming-of-age in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the mid-1950s. However, despite the fact that Rowell goes to some length to retain the sparse, skeletal, incidental quality of Hinton’s prose – it really feels more like an adaptation of a short story – this doesn’t exactly feel like Coppola fully renouncing his grander, widescreen ambitions either. Instead, it’s an odd combination of small-scale and large-scale ambition that clocks in at under ninety minutes but also has grandiose and heroic aspirations that tends to make most of the characters feel as if they’re posing or performing in noble silhouette, with key events separated by stylised 50s-esque soundstage sequences. What was incidental in Hinton’s novel becomes somewhat elemental here, as we’re introduced to the two main subcultures in 50s Tulsa – the upper-class “Socs” and the lower-class “Greasers” – through a classical three-act structure in which a fatal rumble is followed by a retreat to the country, and then by another rumble. Along the way, there’s an extraordinary number of up-and-coming actors to behold – Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Diane Lane, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio – but the film isn’t driven by any one character so much as Coppola’s taste for the way nightlife started to emerge as a distinctively adolescent experience in the 1950s, with the film often feeling as if it is set over a single twenty-four-hour period, opening with a nightscape that the characters only have a certain amount of time to outrun or outwit before it falls again. In some ways, that nightscape is what makes the film so liberating and breathtaking, as we watch these teenagers slips and slide across an adult world with no regard for the functions or distinctions that hold during daylit hours, drifting and overlapping in what is also effectively a black-and-white world, perhaps explaining the presence of Gone With The Wind as a kind of symbol of hope, a Technicolor fantasy, throughout the story. But, at the same time, those looming, expanded distances also makes us aware how far this adolescent prison stretches as well, like the ghostly train whistle that’s always there somewhere in the background, until all the characters feel as if they are all trying to make it to the edge of night, the end of the world, somewhere beyond all the drive-ins, diners and vacant parks that Coppola lovingly subsumes into Hinton’s vast Oklahoman emptinesses. In retrospect, then, it’s not hard to see why this became such a foundational film for the 80s Brat Pack – there’s the same fixation on subculture, “walking in the park, when it gets late at night,” that haunted the Hughes generation – but it also makes you realise just how much subsequent teenage films held back from nightlife, as if the night itself were a 50s phenomenon that was all but erased by the MTV-lit 80s, and only really available in a darkened cinema, or the exquisitely elegiac treatment Coppola gives it here.