“The Outsiders” (1983)
The cult status it has earned since its release and its astonishing cast of future superstars now combine to somewhat cloud the assessment of “The Outsiders,” something not helped by its reissue in 2005 in a substantially reworked version that added 22 extra minutes of footage and replaced whole segments of Carmine Coppola’s original score with pop songs from the 1950s period in which it’s set. But while it does boast some very sparky performances from its outstanding young cast (C.Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise and especially, on a recent rewatch, the perenially undervalued Patrick Swayze), Coppola’s adaptation of S.E Hinton’s beloved teen classic remains a curiously unengaging affair, and partly this is down to a fundamental disconnect between content and form. Coppola understood the grit of the story, which revolves around a group of kids from the wrong side of the tracks tangling with the local rich kids with tragic results, and apparently demanded such verisimilitude that the church burning scene famously nearly became a real conflagration. But he also gives free rein to almost exactly the opposite impulse. “The Outsiders” is astonishingly gorgeous (stunning Stephen H Burum cinematography) to look at, and whether it’s the exuberant youthful beauty of its cast or the spectacular sunsets and stylized nighttime rumbles, it adds an avoidable gloss of glamor and a filter of nostalgia to what should be a rawer, more affecting and immediate story. Case in point: the poetic scene between Macchio and Howell that’s shot to deliberately refer to the movie version of “Gone with the Wind,” the book they’d just been reading. Similarly, Coppola’s near avant-garde use of music (score in the original; songs with distractingly on-the-nose lyrics in the re-release) means that whole stretches of dialogue are inaudible and action scenes, as desperate and dramatic as they should be, take on a romanced, balletic quality. All this simply serves to drive a wedge of style between the viewer and the characters. You might think after the financial disaster of “One from the Heart” Coppola would be in chastened, subdued form, but “The Outsiders” might be on the surface a less ambitious project, but the filmmaker is all over it, at times even getting in its way. [B-]
“Rumble Fish” (1983)
While “Hunger Games” and dystopian sci-fi is all the rage, it’s fun to remember that young adult novels, albeit of a much different stripe, were also in vogue in the 1980s. And so Coppola belted out two S.E. Hinton adaptations in the early half in the decade that were both be released in 1983. While lesser regarded than the star-studded, more commercial “The Outsiders,” “Rumble Fish” is the much more accomplished work. Much more overtly experimental, expressionistic and leaning heavily on the French New Wave, the film is a bold, moody and starkly black and white exploration of teen angst and disenchantment. And so of course it started in earnest the career of ne plus ultra actor of adolescent disillusionment of that time: Matt Dillon who had already starred in “Over The Edge” and “Tex” (the latter also an S.E. Hinton adaptation), as well as “The Outsiders.” Featuring an unorthodox score by Police drummer Stewart Copeland (who as a first-time composer was perhaps not yet fully attuned to the medium), some fairly avant garde, film noir stylization, and striking sound design that capitalized on the hushed and whispery intonation of Mickey Rourke, “Rumble Fish” centers on a disheartened gang leader looking to change his ways (Rourke) and the younger brother who reveres him and wants to emulate him in every way possible (Dillon). Co-starring Coppola muse Diane Lane and Dennis Hopper with appearances by Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne and Tom Waits, Coppola wrote the screenplay with Hinton during their off days shooting “The Outsiders” (how’s that for multitasking?). Style threatened to overwhelm substance in Coppola’s films many times during his career (“One From The Heart” being a prime example), and “Rumble Fish” is a polarizing work in the Coppola canon in this regard. The filmmaker himself saw the film as his deserved artistic treat for delivering the more conventional studio effort of “The Outsiders” (Coppola was a card-carrying member of the “one for them, one for me” club). Stylish and brash, boasting an atmosphere of sweaty oppressiveness and an arrestingly cool visual treatment, “Rumble Fish” is a great marriage of poetry and passion, delivering both in equal, lasting measure. [B+]
“The Cotton Club” (1984)
It’s easy to see what “The Cotton Club” was meant to be —a sprawling, colorful, multi-stranded crime drama that would do for the Harlem Jazz scene of the 1930s what “The Godfather” had done for the postwar New York mafia. A passion project of superproducer Robert Evans, who had designed the film as his own directorial debut, no expense had been spared on the lavish preproduction, including hiring Coppola, along with William Kennedy, to rewrite Mario Puzo’s screenplay. So when Evans abruptly asked him to take over just weeks before shooting was due to start, in Coppola’s words, “Evans had set the tone for the level of extravagance long before I got there.” In need of a bona fide hit after two small-scale teen dramas and the bankrupting failure of “One from the Heart,” Coppola was not to find it with this film, which bespeaks that curious kind of disappointment in which individual elements are promising, occasionally even thrilling (especially the sublime tap routines of Gregory and Maurice Hines) but is put together with (ironically) a baffling lack of rhythm. Spending way too much time on the vacant love triangle between three thinly drawn, blank white protagonists (Richard Gere’s trumpet player, Diane Lane’s ambitious moll and James Remar’s vicious mobster Dutch Schultz), and relegating the much more interesting race and class issues to the status of subplot, background noise or “local color,” the film suffers from a lack of internal momentum and feels curiously undramatic. Perhaps that’s because all the drama happened offscreen: “Apocalypse Now” gets the press for its nightmarish production, but “The Cotton Club” (in addition to Evans’ conviction for cocaine trafficking, which happened a couple of years before filming began) also saw massive cost overruns, which Coppola and Evans would blame each other for in the acrimonious legal wrangling that followed the film’s underperformance. And it even had a murder, when one of the film’s backers (not the Arab arms dealer, a different one!) was shot repeatedly in the head and then blown up with dynamite in a contract killing commissioned by a colleague angry at being squeezed out of a producer’s role. All of which is, sadly, a lot more interesting than the film itself, though we could watch Gregory Hines tapdance pretty much forever. [B-]
