‘The Outsiders’ at 40: Francis Ford Coppola’s Retro Teen Classic Somehow Stayed Gold

It’s definitely stayed gold.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of The Outsiders, a movie that was not received with much warmth by critics upon its release, but did well at the box office and became a phenomenon when it hit VHS and cable television. I can personally vouch for that last fact, being a wee lad in the 1980s with an older sister whose personal devotion to the “Greasers” depicted in the film reached near-religious levels. 

For something with such a cultural footprint—the house where the movie was shot is now a museum and a musical version just debuted in Los Angeles—the film is quite simple. The story is set in mid-’60s Tulsa, an area stuck in time that feels like the 1950s and even the 1930s when our characters start hopping freight trains. A group of young burnouts (outsiders, you might say) hang out with their shirts off, talkin’ tough. Some are still in high school, others work in gas stations. All carry blades, and none have a future. But wow do they look great.

A misunderstanding leads to an accidental murder, then hiding out, then an act of heroism, a tragedy, and a path forward. The shooting style mixes natural locations and intentionally “Hollywood-like” fake vistas. Some of the dialogue is hopelessly cringe, but the performances are so sincere it works. The music (is that Stevie Wonder?) is sweeping and grand, and it all ends in glorious tragedy. Fourteen year olds of the era had no choice but to stan.

While teen girls screaming for cute boys (and their hunky older brothers) in movies was certainly not invented by Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of the 1967 S. E. Hinton novel, The Outsiders represents an important milestone in what we now call “fandom.” While the movie itself was deliberately retro, the young stars (later christened the “Brat Pack”) were very much of their present, and the quasi-“shared universe” from which these characters emerged pointed to the future of entertainment.

Everything about this project is unusual. Hinton was a kid—15 years old!—when she started writing the novel, an exaggerated look at high school cliques in her hometown of Tulsa. It was published when she was only 17, and there are more than a few arguments out there calling it the lodestar of YA fiction industry. She would publish three more books over the next 12 years (That Was Then, This Is Now; Rumble Fish; and Tex), and while they weren’t exactly sequels, they were set in the same mid-century Middle America teeming with angry youth seemingly eager to meet tragic ends.

Between Summer 1982 and Autumn 1983 three of the four books were adapted to film, and all of them starred Matt Dillon. Tex, the tale of an angry (but dreamy!) boy and his horse, was first, directed by Tim Hunter and released by Disney. At the other end was Rumble Fish, shot like a fever dream by Francis Ford Coppola blending rock video aesthetics in high contrast black-and-white with weird score by Stewart Copeland. In-between was the sweet spot, The Outsiders, a West Side Story on the prairie bursting with talent. 

Matt Dillon isn’t the star, but his role of Dally Winston, the doomed burnout that looks after the younger Greasers, is the juiciest role. C. Thomas Howell plays the lead, the wide-eyed Ponyboy, and Ralph Macchio is outstanding as Johnny, the Sam to Ponyboy’s Frodo. Fate dictates that these two must hide their identities for a bit—and as they hide in an abandoned church, spending their time eating baloney, chasing rabbits, and reading Gone With The Wind, they must alter their hair. When Ponyboy loses his would-be tough looks thanks to some new blonde locks, Johnny clocks that his friend’s sunnier, kinder side is actually beautiful. “Stay gold, Ponyboy,” he tells him later, and nary a teenager’s heart failed to melt!

Behold the rest of the cast:  Ponyboy’s two older brothers are Patrick Swayze as Darry, just on the other side of being an adult, and Rob Lowe is the kind middle brother Soda Pop. Emilio Estevez is the dopey, beer-swilling friend in the Mickey Mouse T-shirt called Two-Bit, and Tom Cruise is the crazed loose canon Steve, positively acting his brains out. (Cruise is kinda horrible in this movie, but also, in a way, outstanding.) Other affiliates of the Greasers include Tom Waits (!) as a bar owner.

On the other side of the tracks you’ll find the Socs (pronounces So-shizz, short for “society”), basically the rich snobs. Diane Lane (and her pal Michelle Meyrink, Jordan from Real Genius) are part of this crew, but recognize that young Ponyboy and Johnny are still nice kids, unlike Dally, who is a gross, chauvinistic pig (but suuuuuuuch a fox, as my sister and her friends would attest!)

Francis Ford Coppola was at a weird spot in his career at the time. He and his company Zoetrope just lost their shirt on the musical One From The Heart, a movie that is better than its reputation, but a financial flop that would have killed other careers. (Luckily, he was coming off quite a run: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now.) According to lore, he received a note from a schoolteacher urging him to adapt the book. Seeing pages of signatures from teens endorsing the plea in different color ink touched him.

It’s weird how little actually happens in the movie. The guys are hanging out, there’s a fight, Ponyboy and Johnny hide, a crazy thing happens, there’s a rumble, and that’s kinda it. But the scene work really is terrific. I can’t lie and say all the acting is great—I won’t diss anyone specifically, but some of these kids were pretty boys first, thespians second—but there’s a realness that shines through. The two best scenes are when Ponyboy and Johnny are cutting each other’s hair, clearly ad-libbing. The way they are saying “ow!” can’t be over-rehearsed to work. It’s truly great. The other great moment is when most of the Greasers (except for Johnny) are at the house, starting their day. They’re all half-naked, running in-and-out of the shower, or drinking beer in front of the TV. (Indeed, this sequence was rewound and replayed countless time by my older sister and her friends.) 

It’s this attention to detail that, I fear, is missing in much of the teen-centric material that’s gushing out across our streaming servers today. Yes, there are cool dances that go viral, but moments of interaction that feel real and based out of the characters? That feels less common, and part of why The Outsiders remains a classic. 

Coppola released a longer cut (The Outsiders: The Complete Novel) in 2005, but HBO Max currently hosts the original. It still gets the job done. 

Jordan Hoffman is a writer and critic in New York City. His work also appears in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and the Times of Israel. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and tweets about Phish and Star Trek at @JHoffman.