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" (rhymes with gauche), 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 (C. Thomas Howell) and Johnny (Ralph Macchio), on a trek away from Tulsa to live on the lam and find new ways of being brave and getting hurt. Another greaser, Dallas (Matt Dillon), 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 (by Carmine Coppola, the director's father), 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 (excepting Dillon, whose coltish charm is fast becoming a festival of Method mannerisms). 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