The Outsiders

With a heavy-handed, overwrought sensibility closer to that of a particularly bad telemovie, The Outsiders is a comprehensive misfire from a man who was one of the heavy guns of 1970s American auteurism.

Based on the novel of the same name by S. E. Hinton the story, set in late 50s, revolves around the antagonism between a bunch of working class “greasers” and their well-to-do antagonists, the "soches". When two young greasers (Ralph Macchio and C. Thomas Howell) accidentally kill a soche who is bullying them, they high-tail it to “The Fonze” of their group, Winston (Matt Dillon). He takes them under his protective wing but things don't go according to plan in what is essentially a sentimental coming-of-age movie.

There’s really nothing right about this movie. I doubt that Hinton’s novel is particularly sophisticated but Kathleen Knutsen Rowell’s script is dull and awkward The cast are comprehensively awful. Getting a gaggle of good-looking 80s Hollywood kids (a squeaky voiced Tom Cruise makes one of his earliest screen appearances) to play 50s Nebraskan teen rebels without a cause is simply wrong and, inherent abilities aside, none of them are able to withstand Coppola’s contrived direction which works through the usual teen gang movie tropes with a melodramatic ham-fistedness that would make virtually anyone look ridiculous. At times he seems to be summoning up the ghost of Gone With The Wind. The novel features in the screenplay and periodically Coppola indulges in orangey backlit compositions that wouldn’t look out of place in the 1939 film.

Coppola has a fondness for artifice, something which he demonstrated marvellously with his previous film, One From The Heart (1982) and impressively in his follow-up to this, Rumble Fish, released later that same year, but The Outsiders amply demonstrates how the proclivity could go horribly wrong.

 

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