The Outsiders

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

1983 / 91min / 35mm

A petition from an elementary school librarian and her students in Fresno, California, to Coppola, asking him to make a film from S.E. Hinton’s 1967 coming-of-age classic The Outsiders, led to the director’s standout popular success of the ’80s, a film that brings together a who’s who of up-and-coming young talent—Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez—to enact Hinton’s angst-drenched tale of adolescent growing pains and pitched warfare between rockabilly “greasers” and preppy “Socs” in the grottiest precincts of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nothing gold can stay, of course, but it’s held up awfully well.