«The boys of 56th street» turns 40, a generational masterpiece that launched a battery of great actors – Corriere.it

At the beginning of the 1980s, after the titanic, painful, extremely troubled, megalomaniac exploit of “Apocalypse Now” (1979), the career of a master like Francis Ford Coppola suffered a sudden setback. Descended to milder advice after the flop (even critical) without appeal of the experimental and visionary “One From the Heart” (1982) which caused his Zoetrope Studios to go bankrupt (twenty-six million dollars at the time against budget estimated for a total takings of just over two), Coppola optioned for a paltry sum on the suggestion of a high school librarian two novels by writer Susan E. Hinton: “The Outsiders” and “Rumble Fish” (from us ” The Boys from 56th Street” and “Rusty the Wild”) who had deeply touched the forgotten chords of his existence (such as his affiliation with a street gang as a teenager). The two films were shot close to each other and were both released in 1983: “Rusty the Savage” (universally considered better although ignored by the American public) in October, “The Children of 56th Street” (which reported excellent at home also in relation to its decidedly smaller budget than the two that had preceded it) on March 22 of that year.

Both masterpieces without ifs and buts, also had the merit of revealing and launching an entire generation of young actors who held court for the entire decade and (as in the case of Tom Cruise) much beyond. Oklahoma, 1965. After the death of their parents, the eldest of the three Curtis brothers, Darrel (Patrick Swayze), raises the two minors, “Ponyboy” (C. Thomas Howell) and “Sodapop” (Rob Lowe), who end up part with him of the gang of “greasers” in Tulsa, among whose ranks militate also the cheeky and arrogant Dallas (Matt Dillon), the rough Tim (Glenn Withrow), the more fragile Johnny (Ralph Macchio) and the hotheads “Two-Bit” (Emilio Estevez) and Steve (Tom Cruise). The group, made up mostly of children of proletarians or immigrants, in open contrast to the more economically well-off of the “socs” (abbreviation of “socials”), led by the alcoholic Randy Anderson (Darren Dalton). When Dallas, during a night out at a drive-in with his mates, walks away after unsuccessfully trying to flirt with the beautiful “soc” Cherry Valance (Diane Lane), the latter and her friend Marcia (Michelle Meyrink) they let Johnny and Ponyboy drive them home to the ire of their respective boyfriends Bob (Leif Garrett) and Randy, who ambush them the next day with three other “socs”. Ponyboy almost drowns in a park fountain, while the badly beaten Johnny fights back by stabbing Bob to death. The two boys, with the complacency of Dallas who arranges for the police to search for them in Texas and provides them with a gun and some money, flee to nearby Windrixville where they find shelter in a deconsecrated church. Reached by Dallas and a note from Sodapop urging them to return because Cherry is willing to testify on their behalf, the boys are initially divided on the decision to turn themselves in and then find themselves despite heroic protagonists of the rescue of some children trapped in a fire developed within the church. The enterprise costs both serious burns and Johnny a broken back: and after the latter’s death in hospital, the tension between the two gangs will escalate to the most tragic consequences.

Because the adaptation he commissioned initially the young Kathleen Rowell did not satisfy him, Coppola decided to completely and personally rewrite the film despite not seeing himself credited in the credits as screenwriter: and he leaned everything to his vision of the story as a flamboyant melodrama on the loss of innocence of American youth of the years immediately following the assassination of Kennedy, but also to that of an anthropological reflection on the need to belong to a “family” (not necessarily natural) and on the need to be part of a community united by a feeling of reaffirmation ( or revenge) social. But that’s not all: with the fairy-tale and to some extent mythological dimension which imbued both the historical reconstruction (the magnificent sets by Dean Tavoularis) and the purely cinematic representation (the exceptional “emotional” photography by Stephen H. Burum, always aimed at not so much the reality of the images as the psychological tension of characters and events), Coppola once again asked his own cinema (and will happen again, for almost all the rest of his subsequent production over the course of almost two decades: with “Rusty the wild” and his black and white expressionist of the few months; with “Cotton Club”, “Peggy Sue got married”, “Gardens of stone”, “Tucker”, “Dracula” and paradoxically also with the repressed and poignant “Jack” then) to give back to the public a completely idealized and derealized Time and a past, impossible “elsewhere” and rooted in the soul even before in the memory, to be used as a personal escape from the cage pain of contemporaneity. To (try to) “stay gold”, as one of the film’s key lines say (borrowed from Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, 1923) and Stevie Wonder’s splendid song “Stay Gold” which accompanies the opening credits during which Ponyboy writes the first page of the memories of what is yet to happen.