The cult teen crime-dra­ma that became a Gen X touchstone

“Wel­come to New Grana­da,” reads the road­side bill­board which opens Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge, with the sub­ti­tle ​“tomorrow’s city… today”. But behind it is only emp­ty space. This planned com­mu­ni­ty was meant to be a utopia, but harsh eco­nom­ic real­i­ties have since set in.

While one part of New Grana­da still rep­re­sents the aspi­ra­tions of a mid­dle-class yearn­ing to leave behind the city’s rougher edges for a more peace­ful, crime-free sub­ur­ban life, the old­est hous­ing devel­op­ment in anoth­er part of town has become neglect­ed and impov­er­ished, while new build­ings remain unfin­ished and emp­ty as the mon­ey has run out. A large plot of land orig­i­nal­ly reserved for the con­struc­tion of a skat­ing rink, a bowl­ing alley and twin cin­e­mas is now being up for sale to become an indus­tri­al park.

With nowhere to go but a makeshift recre­ation cen­tre that clos­es at six o’clock every evening, 14-year-old Carl Willat (Michael Kramer) and his friends the bad boy Richie White (Matt Dil­lon), ston­er Claude Zachary (Tom Fer­gus) and Claude’s mute broth­er John­ny (Tiger Thomp­son) are bored out of their minds, and keep them­selves enter­tained with drink­ing, drugs and minor acts of delinquency.

As we fol­low Carl’s mis­ad­ven­tures over sev­er­al days – his roman­tic pur­suit of Cory (Pamela Lud­wig), his rebel­lious fall­outs with his bour­geois par­ents (Andy Romano, Ellen Geer), his var­i­ous run-ins with local police chief Dober­man (Har­ry Northup) and with Cory’s boyfriend Mark Per­ry (Vin­cent Spano) – we see a young man tee­ter­ing on the edge of adult­hood, crim­i­nal­i­ty, and deep dis­il­lu­sion­ment, as he finds the adults around him want­i­ng. New Grana­da is set to explode.

As its open­ing sug­gests, Over the Edge is essen­tial­ly a film about real estate, map­ping out in New Grana­da the ten­sions between class­es and gen­er­a­tions that are being built into America’s future. As the adults show greater con­cern for sales and bot­tom lines and mate­ri­al­ism than for the val­ues and liv­ing con­di­tions of their com­mu­ni­ty, and the overzeal­ous Dober­man, in dis­play­ing an open, deeply prej­u­di­cial con­tempt for the junior high school­ers, in fact cre­ates the kind of prob­lems that he is meant to solve, the chil­dren too learn to stop car­ing, and start devel­op­ing a default dis­dain for authority.

These kids may be unruly, but their delin­quen­cy is learnt: you can see it in the way that they appro­pri­ate the lan­guage of grown-ups. There are sev­er­al exam­ples of this in the film, but per­haps the most per­ti­nent­ly absurd are when the young deal­er Tip (Eric Lalich), seat­ed on a deck chair in the sun­ny gar­den of his mother’s home, is heard say­ing on the phone: ​“With infla­tion and the dol­lar drop­ping, it could get pret­ty heavy…. I don’t make the mar­ket, I’m just out on the street like every­one else,” or when Mark tells Carl, ​“Any time you want to come and say hel­lo, just leave a mes­sage with my secretary.”

The kids’ cal­lous indif­fer­ence, too, reflects the atti­tudes of their par­ents. Like the ​‘botany box’ in the class room of a dis­grun­tled teacher, this com­mu­ni­ty is an ecosys­tem – and the dys­func­tion and rot with­in it are not con­fined mere­ly to its saplings.

Three dif­fer­ent real­i­ties col­lid­ed to build – and then almost destroy – Over the Edge. The first of these was an arti­cle appear­ing in the San Fran­cis­co Exam­in­er in 1973 about bored local kids in Fos­ter City, Cal­i­for­nia who kept trash­ing the new planned com­mu­ni­ty where they lived. Not only was this real-life sto­ry the inspi­ra­tion for the film’s screen­play, but its writ­ers Charles S Hass and Tim Hunter spent time with the teenagers of Fos­ter City to find out what made them tick. As a result, even if Kaplan’s film is ulti­mate­ly exploita­tion fic­tion (with a com­bustible cli­max entire­ly dif­fer­ent from any­thing that actu­al­ly took place in Fos­ter City), it nonethe­less comes with a lived-in nat­u­ral­ism that emerges from all the ground-lev­el research that went into its screenplay.

The sec­ond real­i­ty was in the cast­ing. All the child actors were, unusu­al­ly, play­ing their own age. Michael Eric Kramer and Vin­cent Spano already had some expe­ri­ence on cam­era, but the oth­er teen leads, includ­ing Matt Dil­lon (dis­cov­ered in New York, aged 14), Pamela Lud­wig and Tom Fer­gus, were appear­ing on screen for their first time, while the extras were non-pro­fes­sion­als recruit­ed from the Col­orado com­mu­ni­ty where the film was shot. This brings a high degree of vérité to Over the Edge, which has more in com­mon with the fly-on-the-wall hang-out aes­thet­ics of Richard Lin­klater (who has since express­ly claimed the film as an influ­ence on his 1993 fea­ture Dazed and Con­fused) than with oth­er ​‘gang films’ released in 1979.

The third real­i­ty, how­ev­er, was pre­cise­ly the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing these gang films. After screen­ings of Wal­ter Hill’s The War­riors in 1979 led to real-world van­dal­ism, vio­lence and even mur­der among gang-affil­i­at­ed the­atre­go­ers, stu­dios became ner­vous about pro­mot­ing any­thing with vague­ly sim­i­lar themes, and so titles like Robert L Collins’ Walk Proud, Philip Kaufman’s The Wan­der­ers, Michael Pressman’s Boule­vard Nights and Over the Edge received only very lim­it­ed the­atri­cal releas­es, effec­tive­ly killing their chances at box-office success.

Over the Edge only grad­u­al­ly built its audi­ence with repeat screen­ings on cable in the ​’80s and a home video release in 1989. But its fans would even­tu­al­ly include Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, whose music video for ​‘Smells Like Teen Spir­it’ was a loose homage to the film’s cli­max in the school. Over the Edge has now tran­scend­ed to the sta­tus of cult classic.

Set to a sound­track of Cheap Trick, The Ramones, The Cars and Van Halen, Over The Edge might sound like a preachy after school spe­cial, akin to the hilar­i­ous­ly po-faced edu­ca­tion­al short film on van­dal­ism which is shown in the school assem­bly and gets all the pupils cheer­ing at the sight of win­dows being smashed. Kaplan’s film, how­ev­er, is noth­ing like that. It refus­es to demonise any of its char­ac­ters: the chil­dren are essen­tial­ly good peo­ple, in spite, per­haps even because, of their ulti­mate orgy of destruc­tion (which is pre­sent­ed as a scat­ter-gun act of revenge), and even the flame-fan­ning Dober­man tries to act prop­er­ly, with the most uncon­scionable act that he com­mits framed in such a way as to be jus­ti­fi­able from his point of view.

There is no clear moral mes­sage here, and the end­ing is left unre­solved, as Carl, now come of age in a cru­cible of vio­lence, heads into an uncer­tain future. Sev­er­al times in the film, Carl is warned by Dober­man of the cru­cial ​‘choice’ that he must make about the road that he trav­els. The choice that Carl does ulti­mate­ly make odd­ly aligns Over the Edge, for all the white­ness of its char­ac­ters and the sub­ur­ban­ism of its set­ting, to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, except that Kaplan’s film is more con­cerned with divi­sions of age than of race. Carl may get a hero’s send-off in the final scene, but giv­en where he is at the time, and where he is going, there would still seem to be trou­ble ahead. As always in this film, things could go either way.

“This isn’t just a New Grena­da prob­lem. I’ve talked to city man­agers and coun­cil­men and may­ors all over the coun­try, and heard that same stuff about the kids over and over again.” The speak­er is Jer­ry Cole (Richard Jami­son), Pres­i­dent of the Home­own­ers’ Asso­ci­a­tion at New Grena­da, and a key fig­ure in the move to sell off the town’s future heart and soul to com­mer­cial con­cerns. His words bring to mind anoth­er Pres­i­dent who, two years lat­er, would spear­head a con­ser­v­a­tive cam­paign renew­ing the War on Drugs and rein­forc­ing fam­i­ly val­ues (two poli­cies whose fail­ure, and whose unwit­ting con­tri­bu­tion to the social malaise, are care­ful­ly staged here).

Which is to say that Kaplan’s tale of teen delin­quen­cy and dis­af­fec­tion is both drama­tis­ing a coun­try­wide prob­lem of its times, and pre­sent­ing the state of the nation. This is an alle­go­ry of an Amer­i­ca ever under con­struc­tion, and it exam­ines, in a nuanced, even-hand­ed and unsanc­ti­mo­nious man­ner, the mon­ey-obsessed mind­set of adults, par­ents and entrenched author­i­ties no less than the hos­tile recal­ci­trance of errant youth on their road to nowhere.

Over the Edge is avail­able on High Def­i­n­i­tion (1080p) Blu-ray with its orig­i­nal uncom­pressed mono audio, via Arrow Video from 31 May.