The Outsiders

This is a film that carries you along and there is an added savour in seeing those cherubic faces which have since settled into middle age. Read full review

The director gives us a small, sincere and nearly perfectly realized film about adolescence in Oklahoma, aptly entitled The Outsiders. [24 Mar 1983]

Francis Coppola's revision of his 1983 film of S.E. Hinton's best seller The Outsiders is funny, touching and revelatory, with twenty-two minutes of added footage and a new soundtrack featuring Elvis Presley. [Review of re-release] Read full review

The charismatic Dillon is a believable delinquent and gets solid support from a cast that went on to populate some of the better youth pictures in years to come. [Review of re-release] Read full review

Coppola's teenagers seem trapped inside too many layers of storytelling. Read full review

The director's touch of class is consistently present, but it may be a case of the wrong man for the job, since overall film plays unevenly, with a cliche and detached ambiance that robs the plotline of what passion it might have whipped up. Read full review

Lightly likeable, but the kids at whom it's aimed would probably rather be leaping in the aisles to Duran Duran, while their parents would opt for a rerun of Rebel Without a Cause. Read full review

Francis Coppola has made a well acted and crafted but highly conventional film out of S.E. Hinton's popular youth novel, The Outsiders. Read full review

As a movie, it's mediocre. Read full review

This is an honestly moving, ungainly film. [25 Mar 1983]

But whether even kids will be able to take The Outsiders seriously is a hard question. Whether by fidelity to his source or by director's embellishments, Coppola has come up with a story about tough kids who appreciate sunsets and recite Robert Frost from memory, about members of a mid-American urban underclass who ponder their situations with the dispassionate acumen of sociologists. The Outsiders is about "greasers" who are not greasy, and it seems likely that even kids will see through it. [29 March 1983, p.5]

The loving exhumation of an earlier cinematic style suggests that the director is looking to regain his own moviemaking innocence, to make the kind of picture that moved him as a child. But you can't go home again -- not on secondhand, sentimentalized memories. In transferring Hinton's teens to the screen, Coppola and screenwriter Kathleen Knutsen Rowell have idealized them to the point of cliche. [4 Apr 1983, p.74]

The Outsiders works itself up into overstylized tizzies during things like the rumble sequence, but its overall energy level is alarmingly faint, and the failure to add new dimensions or new material to the Hinton original suggests an exhausted imagination. Read full review

It’s as if a ruthless gang of Richie Cunninghams terrorized the Fonzies of the world. Read full review

Alas, The Outsiders is not quite a good one. Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama. Read full review

Hinton was still a Tulsa teen when she wrote the best seller (4 million copies in seven languages) in the mid-1960s. Her brain wasn't mucked up with adult equivocation, so she didn't get into those confusing gray zones. Great for her, but not for Coppola, who turns this long-awaited story into baffling mush. Read full review

It is spectacularly out of touch, a laughably earnest attempt to impose heroic attitudes on some nice, small characters purloined from a ''young-adult'' novel by S.E. Hinton, the woman who wrote the novel on which ''Tex'' was based. Read full review

Francis Ford Coppola's gang film is as moony about death as "One From the Heart" was over romance; the film is unremitting in its morbid sentimentality, running its teenage characters through a masochistic gamut of beatings, killings, burnings, and suicides. Read full review