Testosterone-driven action meets dreamy interludes: How The Outsiders launched the careers of the Brat Pack

It was an adaptation of a young adult novel about gang violence written by a 15-year-old author from Oklahoma. The director’s career was in the doldrums when he made it. The glories of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now must have seemed very distant at the time Francis Ford Coppola embarked on his 1983 film version of SE Hinton’s The Outsiders. His previous movie, the big-budget musical One from the Heart (1981), had been a resounding flop. His company Zoetrope was close to bankruptcy and he was said to have racked up a personal debt of $20m. 

Coppola later claimed that he had been close to quitting the movie business altogether. Instead, working with teenagers a long way from Hollywood helped him rediscover his passion for filmmaking. “I used to be a great camp counsellor, and the idea of being with half a dozen kids in the country and making a movie seemed like being a camp counsellor again. It would be a breath of fresh air. I’d forget my troubles and have some laughs again,” he told The New York Times. 

The story of how Hinton’s book first reached Coppola could have inspired a movie itself. In July 1980, Jo Ellen Misakian, a librarian from the Lone Star School in Fresno, California, had sent him a copy with an accompanying letter explaining that this was the one book all her seventh and eighth grade students had actually read. They now wanted someone to make a movie of it – and thought he was the right man for the job. By sheer luck, the letter reached Coppola, who thought it was “cute” and passed it on to his producer, Fred Roos, who saw something in it. 

You can’t help but think of these unlikely origins when you watch the film. Given his own rapidly sinking status in Hollywood, Coppola must have identified with the “Greasers”, the blue collar teenage roughnecks growing up in mid-1960s Tulsa in the shadow of their rivals, the “Socs” (short for “Socials” and pronounced with a soft “c”). These were the wealthy middle-class kids in chinos and baseball jackets who lived on the other, more respectable side of the tracks. By then, the director was an outsider himself, and so were his young actors. 

It still gives you a jolt to watch the skirmish at the start of the movie. Daydreaming adolescent Ponyboy Curtis (C Thomas Howell) is set upon by the Socs. They rough him up and make a shallow cut on his throat. Then Ponyboy’s brothers and friends run to his rescue. They are very young but they all look strangely familiar. Is that hyperactive, denim-clad delinquent with the terrible teeth and snotty, bleeding nose really Tom Cruise? Isn’t that Patrick Swayze playing Ponyboy’s stern, muscular older brother, Darrel? In the mayhem, you can also spot Rob Lowe as Ponyboy’s middle brother, Sodapop, and Emilio Estevez and Matt Dillon as fellow Greasers, fighting for one of their own. Ralph Macchio, playing Ponyboy’s best friend Johnny Cade, hangs back, looking as anguished as Sal Mineo once did as the loner opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. 

The Outsiders is the cinematic equivalent of one of those “before they were famous” stories, in which celebrities are shown in family snaps or school photographs. They’re instantly recognisable but somehow don’t yet seem fully formed. 

Cruise, who has only a minor part as Steve Randle, shows exactly the same physical assurance we know from all those Top Gun and Mission Impossible films. He has barely been on screen for five minutes when he performs a backflip from the hood of a car, seemingly just for the sake of it. However, his trademark Cruise charm is completely absent. He is missing a front tooth. When he smiles, the effect is more grotesque than ingratiating. Lowe, meanwhile, has a surprising innocence that completely belies his louche and lecherous later reputation. Only Swayze (who was close to 30) seems properly grown up. In fact, as the scolding older brother holding the family together after the death of their parents, he is more earnest and mature here than in Dirty Dancing a few years later. Even Dillon, playing the James Dean-like delinquent just out of prison, is strangely callow and puppy-like. In the fight scenes, you realise he is still a teenager. 

Coppola wasn’t above playing a few cruel psychological tricks on his young actors. Those cast as the Greasers were given smaller per diems and less luxurious accommodation than the actors cast as the Socs. 

The Outsiders combines lyricism and machismo. Befitting its subject matter, it has moments of awkwardness and pretentiousness as its adolescent heroes discuss Robert Frost poems together. It’s very much a boy’s own tale. Diane Lane is the single significant female figure. She plays Cherry Valance, the beautiful high school redhead who’s dating one of the Socs. She inadvertently sets in motion the chain of events that causes several deaths. 

In one scene, Dallas (Dillon) tries to chat Cherry up at a drive-in movie but he doesn’t have the words or the manners to express his feelings. Instead, in a scene at once comic and creepy, he harasses her with crude talk about whether she is a real redhead before falling off his seat. Cherry eventually throws a cup of coke in his face. This is as close as the film comes to a romantic subplot.  

The Outsiders is a film about working class adolescents in a run-down part of Oklahoma, and yet it has a fairy-tale aspect. It is at once naturalistic and highly stylised. Harrowing scenes of intimidation and violence sit alongside moments of extreme sentimentality. 

The little corner of Tulsa in which the film is set isn’t exactly diverse. The town seems to be composed almost entirely of posturing, narcissistic white male teenagers. The down-at-heel Greasers are played by the best looking, most talented young actors that Coppola could find in either Los Angeles or New York. They may live in dilapidated old houses but they still have an air of youthful glamour. The Stevie Wonder song that plays over the opening credits, “Stay Gold”, inspired by the Frost poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, is full of yearning and nostalgia – not what you expect in a film about angry young delinquents. 

In his autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Lowe gives an entertaining account of Coppola’s exhaustive casting process. The contenders for the main roles in The Outsiders went through as many auditions as competitors on a TV talent show. Lowe was close to giving up on his acting career and enrolling in college instead. This was his last shot. Coppola’s producer Roos, who also worked with George Lucas, had an uncanny instinct for sniffing out new talent. In the past, he had helped discover everyone from Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford to Diane Keaton and Al Pacino. 

It’s a matter of debate whether The Outsiders cast became stars because of Coppola or if they were chosen because they had such star quality in the first place. Whatever the case, almost all the film’s main protagonists went on to have very substantial careers. Their ability is obvious. The film itself is very uneven. Abrasive, testosterone-driven action and comedy gives way to dreamy interludes. At times, Ponyboy and his friends seem like mischievous latter-day versions of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer but then, as they rescue kids from burning buildings or as death comes into their world, they become morbid and self-conscious. 

Coppola himself didn’t seem entirely sure what to make of his own movie. In 2005, he re-edited it, ostensibly to make it closer to Hinton’s novel. He added several Elvis Presley ballads to the soundtrack, including “Blue Moon” and a peerless version of Bob Dylan’s “Tomorrow is a Long Time”. He also put back in a scene of Sodapop and Ponyboy in bed together. There’s no sexual connotation here. The older boy is simply trying to comfort his younger brother. It’s an intimate and delicate moment, entirely innocent – but early audiences in 1983 had laughed at it anyway and it had therefore been cut.

The extra material adds to the film’s emotional depth but does nothing for its pacing. You can understand why viewers looking for an action-driven gang movie might have been frustrated by some of the more poetic flights here. Even the final clash between the Greasers and the Socs is heavily stylised, taking place in the rain and mud, as if it is some primitive, medieval battle. This is an art house version of a teen movie. Its fascination lies precisely in its psychological complexity and its mix of sensitivity and braggadocio.  

It helped too, of course, that Coppola could draw on the collective charisma of Dillon, Lane, Lowe, Howell, Swayze and all the rest. The director had so much youthful star power at his disposal that Cruise, for once, was just a minor character. 

The Outsiders is being re-released as part of a series of Coppola’s “outliers” alongside lowish budget, very personal later features from the director, such as Tetro (2009) and Youth Without Youth (2007), which never won the mainstream approval of The Godfather or Apocalypse Now. Nonetheless, its qualities are obvious. Not only is it one of the most evocative and insightful teen movies of its era, it also launched the careers of the biggest stars of the Brat Pack era and beyond. 

The Outsiders is released on 8 May on MUBI as part of Reignite Cinema: Francis Ford Coppola’s Outliers. It’s also available on Amazon Prime