Noth­ing Gold Can Stay – In praise of Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders

In Fran­cis Coppola’s maligned 1996 film Jack, the main char­ac­ter is shown cradling a but­ter­fly in the palm of his hand. At the film’s con­clu­sion, Jack (Robin Williams) implores his young friends to savour the present. These moments might be over­ly sen­ti­men­tal but they cer­tain­ly ring true. They also bring into focus the degree to which bit­ter­sweet­ness has its place with­in the director’s filmography.

Through­out his career Cop­po­la has sought to cap­ture both the excite­ment and the trep­i­da­tion that comes with mov­ing from child­hood to adult­hood; from inno­cence to expe­ri­ence. It’s a mood that under­pins 1983’s The Out­siders, which Cop­po­la adapt­ed from S E Hinton’s 1967 young adult nov­el of the same name.

The Out­siders marks the begin­ning of a curi­ous 10-year peri­od in Coppola’s career, imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the com­mer­cial fail­ure of his ambi­tious roman­tic dra­ma One from the Heart. Cop­po­la was com­pelled to take on a string of mod­est­ly-scaled movies where he was very much a direc­tor for hire. They’re fas­ci­nat­ing entries in his fil­mog­ra­phy, often because they aren’t, at first glance any­way, like the films for which he is best known.

In keep­ing with the tra­di­tion of film­mak­ers like Vin­cent Min­nel­li and Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, One from the Heart had crys­tallised Coppola’s inter­est in arti­fice as a means of artic­u­lat­ing the desires of the human heart. While ren­dered on a small­er scale than One from the Heart, the visu­al palette of The Out­siders’ is marked by flour­ish­es of height­ened colour (look out for those gor­geous sun­set skies) which evoke a 1950s Amer­i­can moviemak­ing tra­di­tion that’s still syn­ony­mous with Nicholas Ray’s Rebel With­out a Cause.

The Out­siders is suf­fused with intense close-ups of angst-rid­den young faces set against a back­drop of vivid colours. This takes it away from visu­al real­ism towards some­thing more painter­ly: con­sid­er the use of deep blue for the scene in which John­ny (Ralph Mac­chio) and Pony­boy (C Thomas How­ell) flee town on a train. Stephen H Burum, cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er on both The Out­siders and its 1983 com­pan­ion piece Rum­ble Fish, has not­ed that, ​“The style of The Out­siders was very roman­tic and pas­sion­ate because kids think that way. The com­po­si­tions were clas­si­cal and pic­to­r­i­al with the cam­era removed and stoic.”

At the cen­tre of The Out­siders is Pony­boy, a teenag­er who is almost too del­i­cate for the harsh world around him. In turn, Ponyboy’s friend John­ny con­veys the tran­sience of life – it is John­ny who quotes (as he does in Hinton’s nov­el) the Robert Frost poem ​‘Noth­ing Gold Can Stay’ to Pony­boy. Jon­ny knows how fleet­ing it all is. Time’s mys­tery is not lost on him. The Out­siders is an essen­tial Cop­po­la film because it is a film about young peo­ple. It may even be truer to Coppola’s artis­tic inter­ests than some of his bet­ter-known movies.

Coppola’s body of work is con­cerned with the pas­sage of time and the fear that can accom­pa­ny star­tling change: Peg­gy Sue Got Mar­ried and Bram Stoker’s Drac­u­la are wild­ly dif­fer­ent movies and yet they each grap­ple with the same exis­ten­tial theme. Of course, The God­fa­ther tril­o­gy also com­mu­ni­cates the idea of time pass­ing, but it’s arguably Coppola’s small­er films that afford­ed him the oppor­tu­ni­ty to real­ly dig into this pre­oc­cu­pa­tion, both dra­mat­i­cal­ly and aesthetically.

In light of Coppola’s recent announce­ment that his long-ges­tat­ing pas­sion project, Mega­lopo­lis, is final­ly under­way – with some­thing of a self-declared mis­sion state­ment that he is mak­ing it for young peo­ple – his career appears to be com­ing full cir­cle. There’s an apro­pos excerpt from Coppola’s diary dat­ed 31 March 1993 which speaks to his long-stand­ing obses­sion with time: ​“So cer­tain char­ac­ters of Mega­lopo­lis are con­cerned with the Ultra­fu­ture; where­as others…are locked in the secure Past. It then would deal with that point in which future and past interact.”

While far from the pro­posed epic sen­si­bil­i­ties of Mega­lopo­lis, The Out­siders would seem to share some sto­ry­telling DNA with Coppola’s newest ven­ture. Maybe it’s this: it’s the kids who need to be paid atten­tion to; for their ener­gy and, rather like Pony­boy and John­ny, for their capac­i­ty to dream.