Patrick Swayze and Rob Lowe star in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 movie that comes crashing back on screen
Like a rock’n’roll power chord, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 teen gangs melodrama The Outsiders comes crashing back on screen, in a longer “complete novel” cut. It is a movie with the heartfelt old-fashioned urgency of a
Hollywood film from much further back, with the Brat Pack in this film the equivalent of the Dead End Kids who made Angels With Dirty Faces in the 1930s. And The Outsiders feels very different from the companion-piece Rumble Fish that Coppola made afterwards with much of the same cast, co-written again with novelist SE Hinton.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma in the early 1960s, there are two gangs, the greasers and the socs – derived from “socials”, the posher, Wasp kids whose parents can afford to join social clubs. There is a not-so-hidden
racism in the socs’ loathing of the greasers who are often from an Italian background. One of the greasers, Ponyboy Curtis (C Thomas Howell) is poignantly in love with a sweet girl, Cherry Valance (Diane Lane), who hangs out with the socs. But this isn’t exactly a tale of star-crossed lovers and the gangs aren’t both alike in dignity. Class and caste divides them: they are the outsiders and the insiders.