Word: coppolas
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...main strength of Francis Ford Coppola's new film The Outsiders is the way it subtly captures this particular human misery. His punks are "greasers" in Tulsa. Oklahoma in the 1960s, and their hangouts are playgrounds and drive-ins instead of subway stations. But the outward toughness and underlying sorrow is the same. By following the agonizing predicaments of three young greasers, the film confronts a startling yet age-old reality many adolescents finding themselves inexplicably cast in on-good roles, reflexively challenge authority because it's the only thing they know. One after-noon for Tulsa's greasers trio...
...OUTSIDERS Directed by Francis Coppola Screenplay by Kathleen Knutsen Rowell
...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...
...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...
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...