The Outsiders
20 St Georges Road, Avondale, Auckland
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Bar open: 1PM
Trailers & shorts: 1:40PM
Main feature: 2PM
*Tickets also available as double feature with Rumble Fish.
1983 / 91 min / PG
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Cast: C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, Diane Lane
The Outsiders is Francis Coppola’s take on SE Hinton’s 1967 novel, and it’s one of his best.
The Outsiders, and its companion film, Rumble Fish (both made back to back and released in 1983, four years after Apocalypse Now) are essential viewing.
It’s surprising that The Outsiders isn’t better known, given that it’s credited as the film that brought together the Brat Pack, and provided the inspiration for several songs (Stay Gold, Ponyboy, by The Get Up Kids, being the best one).
The story of how The Outsiders came about is very sweet: Coppola received a letter from a teacher and her class explaining that it was their favourite book, and they would like to see it made into a film. Coppola was so touched that he read the book and created the film.
The Outsiders (adapted from SE Hinton's novel) are looking for a better world. The street life of teenage Tulsa is divided into the 'socs' who go to college and wear Brut, and the greasers from the other side of the tracks, who don't.
When a soc is knifed, three greasers go on the run to a rural idyll, turn tragic heroes, and finally return to try to cement a tenuous truce: like so much teenage Americana, it's about the rites of passage from adolescence to adulthood.
Coppola has given the film a fullness that makes it feel freshly minted. Ponyboy, quoting Robert Frost’s poem about how nothing gold (meaning youth) ever lasts, is set against an impossibly golden sunset that always threw us, as did much of the florid dialogue.
The film being seen through Ponyboy, a wanna-be writer with an intense love for reading Gone With the Wind. Coppola has directed the film as Ponyboy would have done it. That clarity results in a movie that will stay gold.
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