Future Stars (left to right): Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze and Tom Cruise
Image: A.P.L.
The ninth F.A.Z. film evening for subscribers on Tuesday evening, June 27, from 7 p.m. will deal with Francis Ford Coppola’s youth classic “The Outsiders” – and then invite you to a discussion.
Forty years later, when a successful director films a young adult novel and casts a group of up-and-coming young actors whose names you don’t yet know, you usually find that few of those young people have become real stars. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders is the exception to this rule. The young savages he rounded up for his Tulsa gangs came to be known as the “Brat Pack” and are now almost exclusively in the premier league of American film business: Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Diane Lane, Rob Lowe, and of course Tom Cruise and Patrick Swayze play the teenagers who let their youth and the city drift with them.
Like the S.E. Hinton novel, the film focuses on the boy from the “wrong neighborhood” whose parents died, who is being raised by the eldest brother – how many other brothers are actually part of the family and who just hangs around because he’s part which gang is the “Greaser” isn’t easy to pinpoint. And that’s exactly how it should be, because for the boys from the precarious circumstances, the gang is a family substitute, because nobody else helps them.