From Your First Cigarette to Your Last Dying Day: “The Outsiders”

 When I was growing up, youth cliques and gangs were a hot topic. West Side Story made it big on Broadway in 1957, and became a must-see film in 1961. It was five years later that S.E. Hinton (Susie to her friends) published a Young Adult novel called The Outsiders. It looked squarely at the lives of teenagers who, because of their looks or family situations, were regarded as social outcasts in their Oklahoma hometown. In the world of this story, teens are divided into two groups. The Socs (pronounced “soshes”) were more affluent, dressed better, and had cool cars with fins. The Greasers worn grubby jeans and T’s, started smoking at a very young age, and didn’t have much use for school. Hinton—who, remarkably, published the novel when she was sixteen—empathized almost entirely with the Greasers, whose underlying pain and sensitivity she understood. The narrator of her novel, Ponyboy Curtis, is a fourteen-year-old who—in the absence of parents—shares strong bonds of loyalty with his three older brothers. Though he's at the fringes of some brutal situations, like a rumble in a local park, he’s basically a good kid who’s polite to girls, loves sunsets, and ruminates over a poem by Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

 Following his acclaimed release of two Godfather films and Apocalypse Now, director-producer Francis Ford Coppola turned his talents to The Outsiders, after a librarian and her students at Lone Star Elementary School in Fresno, California brought the novel to his attention. Now his goal was to find a troupe of very young actors who could embody Hinton’s characters on the screen. C.Thomas Howell, then fifteen, appealingly played Ponyboy. His brothers—the tortured Dally and the take-charge Darrel—were Matt Dillon and Patrick Swayze. Other rising young actors in the cast were Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and (in a small part) Tom Cruise. A key role, that of a very young Greaser who proves himself both a hero and a martyr, was played by Ralph Macchio, just before he became The Karate Kid. (He apparently was 20 at the time, but convincingly looks about 13.) The film’s final moments, in which a close-up of Macchio is superimposed upon an image of Ponyboy writing his story is either hugely poignant or hugely corny, or both at once.

 As a movie, The Outsiders makes an interesting contrast to the much-beloved West Side Story. Its rivalries are purely social rather than ethnic. West Side Story of course pits Puerto Rican immigrants against white kids whose ancestry is probably not far removed from Ellis Island. But in The Outsiders the divide is almost entirely along economic lines. And, of course, there’s no singing and dancing in this film. Being a Greaser doesn’t seem nearly as much fun as being a Jet. The rumble in which most of the characters participate is less picturesque than grubby, fought in the mud during a driving rain.

 At my L.A. public high school there was not the kind of stark social divide portrayed in the film. Though I never heard anyone called a Greaser, we definitely had Soshes, who vied to gain membership in exclusive social clubs. A more innocent version of the kind of divide portrayed in The Outsiders shows up in both the stage (1971) and the film (1978) versions of a box-office hit, Grease. Hinton’s novel could have been an inspiration for that show, but I suspect there was something in the culture that inspired both projects. Ironically, a version of The Outsiders landed on Broadway in 2024, taking home the Tony Award for best musical.