Critics reviews

Even at this early stage of their respective careers, the young actors boasted impressive star power: All the members of the Greaser gang, as well as [Diane] Lane, would eventually play leads in their own movies.

In "The Outsiders," the director's touch of class is consistently present, but it may be a case of the wrong man for the job, since overall film plays unevenly, with a cliche and detached ambiance that robs the plotline of what passion it might have whipped up.

"The Outsiders" isn't as consistently great as "Rebel [Without a Cause]..." But there are moments of greatness here as well as grace, including a restored scene that shows Ponyboy and Soda cuddling in bed. The intimacy of this moment carries an undeniable frisson, largely because such physical closeness between straight male characters is nearly absent from our screens.

Funny, touching and revelatory... ["The Outsiders"] is being seen through Ponyboy, a wanna-be writer with an intense love for reading Gone With the Wind. Coppola has directed the film as Ponyboy would have done it. That clarity results in a movie that will stay gold.

What we have here is one of the most overtly aesthetic, art-for-art’s-sake films in Hollywood’s history, a faux-naïf Pre-Raphaelite mural in which angels with dirty faces but immaculately pure hearts burn with a hard, gemlike flame before being snuffed out in their prime. Reader, I cried.

Coppola's teenagers seem trapped inside too many layers of storytelling... The problem with seeing characters in a highly stylized visual way is that it's hard for them to breathe and move and get us involved in their stories. That's what happens here. The thin narrative material for "The Outsiders" only adds up to a movie of 90 minutes, and even then there are scenes that seem to be killing time.

Surprisingly for Coppola, it's a modest, prosaic, rather puritan drama with a MORAL, which, if you want to be uncharitable, is a last-ditch attempt to prove he can turn in a well-crafted piece without contracting elephantiasis of the budget.

The film is unremitting in its morbid sentimentality, running its teenage characters through a masochistic gamut of beatings, killings, burnings, and suicides... With the climaxes rushing up so quickly, the characters have no time to define themselves; they're just units of suffering and pain lurching from one crisis to another.

After the life-or-death marketing of "Apocalypse Now" and "One from the Heart," it is refreshing to come upon a Coppola film that is, bless it, only a movie. Alas, "The Outsiders" is not quite a good one. Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama.