THE OUTSIDERS Directed by Francis Coppola Screenplay by Kathleen Knutsen
Rowell”He's so greasy he glides when he walks.” This is Tulsa
1966, where lines of class and style are drawn as sharply as in any
war, and there is no demilitarized zone. On one side is the “greaser,”
teen descendant of Elvis, Brando and James Dean; poor white trash and
proud of it. On the other side is the “soc” ,
spiffy as Pat Boone, sweet and snooty as Sandra Dee. The greasers are
wild boys of the road, skipping school, making small trouble, ignoring
their parents or forced to live without them. The rival groups taunt and threaten each other; once in a while they
rumble; sometimes a flare of gang anger can lead to sudden death. One
such incident sends two greasers, Ponyboy and
Johnny , on a trek away from Tulsa to live on the lam
and find new ways of being brave and getting hurt. Another greaser,
Dallas , provides a role model for sexy self-destruction.
The bleak moral of Francis Coppola's movie, based on an S.E. Hinton
novel that has sold 4 million copies in the U.S., is that you can do
good or do bad—but everybody dies. The greasers' turf is the north side of Tulsa: the socs occupy the
south. But The Outsiders' sensibility is operatic enough to make the
film into another West Side Story. From its first frames, when Stevie
Wonder croons a pop ballad over images of suburban sunsets, Coppola
sets the tone of poetic realism, Hollywood style. The greasers, with
their sleek muscles and androgynous faces, display a leonine
athleticism as they move through dusty lots or do a graceful,
two-handed vault over a chain-link fence. Their camaraderie is
familial, embracing, unselfconsciously homoerotic. Left to their
better selves, they can easily go all moony over sunsets, quote great
swatches of Robert Frost verse, or fall innocently asleep in each
other's arms. Their ideal world is both a womb and a locker room; no
women need apply to this dreamy brother hood. With its soft, silvery
lighting, its slow fades and dissolves and a lush score , The Outsiders means to create the
greasers' dream world even as it describes the real world in which they
live and die. After the life-or-death marketing of Apocalypse Now and One from the
Heart, it is refreshing to come upon a Coppola film that is, bless it,
only a movie. Alas, The Outsiders is not quite a good one. Because it
falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom
a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the
picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood
melodrama. Nor are the greasers romanticized enough to be seen as
avatars of the outlaw lovers in Frank Borzage's Moonrise or Nicholas
Ray's They Live by Night. Like the greasers, The Outsiders often seems
to be busily, handsomely going nowhere. Coppola, however, is generous
with his fine young actors . It is easy to sense
Coppola's identification with these boys, and with the feeling of going
it alone against all odds that has made this protean
writer-director-producer Hollywood's most famous and flamboyant
outsider.
—By Richard Corliss
