Which leaves one with the constant feeling that events are being evoked (fantasised?) rather than actually lived through. These framing sequences additionally set a mood of reflexivity, both of the text, foregrounded as fiction (for the ‘reality’ of Ponyboy’s bright sunlight is, of course, the ‘imaginary’ of the viewer’s movie-house darkness), and of the protagonist himself, who appears for a moment uncannily like Wenders’ Hammett, the solitary intellectual transforming experience into ‘art’.
#The outsiders complete novel movie
Here then, is a world unto itself, sealed off by the unfinished sentence (taken verbatim from the novel), ‘When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house …’ which opens the film and is reprised at the close. The usual authority figures are absent too – the all-male Curtis household, joyfully reunited at the hospital, is a more than adequate substitute for the family, with Darrel in loco parentis and Ponyboy himself established as a future father-surrogate in his progression from chasing off (with Dallas) a crowd of urchins at the beginning to saving the schoolchildren’s lives towards the end. There is a careless homoeroticism about this peer group – climaxing in the ecstatic ‘rumble’ in a downpour of rain – that can effectively dispense with the presence of women, apart from the almost iconic Cherry and Marcia. Southern gentlemen and Southern beaux, for they are beautiful. One may also discern echoes of Gone with the Wind, visually underlined in some of the sunset vistas of the rural interlude, thematically in the notion (more explicit in Hinton’s novel) that these kids are Southern gentlemen in the guise of white trash. Ostensibly set in 1966, its iconography seems to owe more to the 50s and to the movies of that decade: the Ponyboy/Johnny relationship recalls that between Jim and Plato in Rebel without a Cause, while teenzine idol Matt Dillon’s Method mannerisms suggest the actor’s – or the character’s – emotional debt to Dean and early Brando. Like Coppola’s working-class characters in One from the Heart, his juvenile delinquents – above all Ponyboy, but also his cohorts – are endowed with an unaccustomed romanticism that feeds eclectically off cultural sources ranging from Beach Blanket Bingo to Robert Frost, but definitely inclining towards the latter as the story goes on.ĭifferent, too, from the older ‘problem youth’ picture in its diffuse sense of period and social context. Its theme of 11 disaffected youth, solidly generic, is lifted into something altogether different from the run of recent teen movies. ‘Why shouldn’t kids have art films too?’: thus Coppola’s rhetorical question, quoted recently in American Film (April 1983), to which The Outsiders would seem to be an initial response (his upcoming Rumble Fish, also based on a ‘classic novel’ by S.E. Julie Pearce, Head of Distribution and Programme Operations The collaborative work of the young cast serves as a testament to Coppola’s skill as director, making their struggle engaging and unforgettable. When a soc is knifed, three greasers go on the run before returning home to negotiate a tenuous truce. Set in a divided Tulsa, where teenage life is either experienced as the ‘socs’, who go to college, have cars and a future, and the ‘greasers’, who come from the wrong side of the tracks. SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.Ĭoppola’s inspired adaptation of SE Hinton’s classic novel captures how it feels to be caught between childhood innocence and adulthood’s disillusionment, and he assembled an impressive and talented young cast: Dillon, Cruise, Estevez, Howell, Lane, Swayze, Lowe and Macchio.
0 kommentar(er)
