#StokerScore Rewound: The Outsiders (1983)

#StokerScore 6/10 

The problem with adapting books into films would appear to be disappointment. Disappointment in that you always seem to disappoint someone. This then becomes a matter of who you don't want to disappoint the most and who the least.

But why disappoint anyone at all?.... it comes down to impressions. Here are a couple of personal examples.

When I was a kid I would read the Garfileld comic strip in the daily newspaper we had delivered to our house. For years I thought that Garfiled spoke with a Yorkshire accent because I didn't realise the strip was American. My mind filled in the missing pieces.

"eh up, Odie"

In 1977, the BBC tried for the most faithful adaptation of Dracula. A novel that because it is written in the form of diary extracts is really difficult to film. It was amazingly atmospheric and Louis Jordan was a great casting choice. But this was the BBC not a movie studio, and 1977 and whilst still my favourite filmed version of the story they took some huge liberties with it. Combining characters, changing relationships, even hair colour. As a reader your imagination runs riot, creating the images from the authors words. Does a movie or tv version of a book ever live up to expectations? I guess that's for you to decide.

Francis Ford Coppola, legendary American film maker and director of classics like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now had made both of those movies by the time he got to The Outsiders in 1983. Having read the book, he decided not only to write the screenplay, but to direct it as well. The outcome? Well, it left me, unsurprisingly, disappointed.

The film is fairly close to the story in that it captures most of the key events of gang life, boy/girl interactions and social attitudes, but that isn't necessarily what the reader of the book wants in the movie. They want, unrealistically in truth, to see every scene played out the way it was written. The second issue is that the actors are not really that good...or maybe it's the dialogue they were given. When Coppola made his own version of Dracula a decade later, he insisted that the three friends fighting the vampire spent time together, taking part in bonding activities like hot-air ballooning. The result was that Quincy P. Morris, Arthur Holmwood and Doctor Seward genuinely seemed to know each other...the chemistry came across even if Keanu's accent, a Californian Jonathan Harker, was laughable .

In contrast this doesn't appear to be true of The Outsiders. In a film that relies heavily on the audiences belief that they will dies for each other, maybe instead of choosing up-and-coming movie stars the film would have been better served by employing people who could act. Then again, maybe viewing the movie in 2017 shows these famous faces in a different light. Swayze was always quite wooden, Cruise has become better, Emilio Estevez was much better in The Breakfast Club. But the main leads, Ralph Macchio as Johnny, C. Thomas Howell as Ponyboy, and Matt Dillon as Dally, struggle. Dillon is the best by far and the problem with Howell and Macchio is that they may have been better swapping parts as Johnny comes across as much younger than Ponyboy. Still, Macchio does capture some of the nervousness in his character and Howell does capture the yearning for something different from his lot in life as Ponyboy.

The relationships in the book are the central part of the story. The need for family and a sense of belonging, yet these are amazingly disregarded. The Curtis brothers love for each other in the absence of their parents is an essential part to the story. That Rob Lowe's Sodapop is hardly even seen is telling. There is also no real understanding of Johnny's home life which forms his need for bonding with Dally and Ponyboy. The Greasers and the Socs are easily identified but the sense of camararderie is missing. You would get a better example of what Coppola and author S. E. Hinton could do together by reading and watching Rumble Fish, an adaptation of another of Hinton's novels filmed back-to-back with The Outsiders and using many of the same cast and crew. Maybe the two of them learned something from the Outsiders experience...

Independantly, I love the book of The Outsiders for it's realistic portrayal of life at the time and the need for support, and I can enjoy the movie for showing some of the same things, but it is very difficult to reconcile the two.