When Johnny and Ponyboy kill a soc in self-defence, seasoned tough guy Dally gives them cash and tells them how to make a getaway. The greasers are the heroes: tearaway Dally ( Matt Dillon), Johnny ( Ralph Macchio), Darry (Patrick Swayze), Sodapop (Rob Lowe) and Steve (Tom Cruise). Class and caste divides them: they are the outsiders and the insiders. But this isn’t exactly a tale of star-crossed lovers and the gangs aren’t both alike in dignity. 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. There is a not-so-hidden racism in the socs’ loathing of the greasers who are often from an Italian background. 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.
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.
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. L ike 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.
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