The Talkies / Bad Boys Inside Out
Bayles, Martha
BAD BOYS INSIDE OUT by Martha Bayles Written by a 16-year-old girl named S.E. Hinton, the youth novel The Outsiders became a minor classic in the late 1960s-especially in junior high school...
...but unlike the Greasers, he doesn't go all wide-eyed and hurt like a moppet in a child-abuse poster...
...The plot is heavy-handed: Mick vanquishes the evil trusties and gets their job, appearing to rehabilitate himself just a little...
...He also knows what he's doing is wrong, but out of willfulness and perversity, he does it anyway...
...Similarly, Paco, the Hispanic pusher, deliberately ignores his affectionate, worrying mother...
...Not Mick O'Brien...
...movies going back to Rebel Without a Cause, we expect the same old answer every time...
...Perhaps in Coppola's and Hinton's imagination, a state reformatory would be full of sorrowful angels...
...When the Socs try to drown Ponyboy for talking to a Soc girl, Johnny kills one of them...
...We wait to see what's going to happen to him, but on a deeper level we wait to see what he's going to do-even when he and Paco are rolling on the floor reaching for the one knife, egged on by the others and cut off from the authorities by a short-circuited electric gate...
...At one point he comes home and finds his mother in the bathtub with a strange man...
...Paco sets up the drug deal, which Mick tries to ambush...
...Nonetheless they are too cocky and selfish to resist the temptation of fast, easy money...
...Not this one...
...It deflates the melodrama to say that Mick ends up on top, then decides to spare Paco...
...Then Ponyboy and Johnny have to skip town, since nobody would take their word against the Socs...
...The kid belongs in a living room, entertaining doting aunts and uncles, not building bombs in his science lab of a cell...
...Arrested and convicted, Mick goes to the state reformatory, while Paco swears blood revenge...
...Needless to say, the heroes are Greasers: Ponyboy, an orphan who lives with his older brothers...
...It is pure class oppression: a textbook case of the affluent taunting the poor simply for being poor...
...Hinton, the youth novel The Outsiders became a minor classic in the late 1960s-especially in junior high school English classes, where it was frequently used to spur discussions of how poverty leads to crime...
...It's equally likely that an antisocial loner like him enjoys spoiling everybody's bets-or that he just wants to get the hell out of the reformatory...
...C. Thomas Howell as Ponyboy, Ralph Macchio as Johnny, and Matt Dillon as Dallas seem talented enough...
...Shortly thereafter, Paco arrives at the reformatory, primed for a battle royal before being transferred to another facility...
...But the melodrama is cheap compared to the drama of Mick's face becoming emotional for the first time: a sob and a laugh as he walks away from the crowd who only a moment before were shouting "Kill him...
...movie which suggests a different answer: that evil might originate within the clay itself...
...or that juvenile delinquents might be made out of that peculiar clay-humanity- which possesses the freedom to accept or reject evil on its own, without being totally conditioned by its surroundings...
...The mark of criminality has yet to appear, although we know from the title that it will...
...And in stories about crime, it is a lot more dramatic, not to say accurate, to assume that the criminal is, on some level, a morally responsible being...
...The role of pure victim is just not that interesting, and Martha Bayles is film critic for The American Spectator...
...and not enough on their minds...
...Dallas, a drifter who has been wrongly jailed...
...And later, when his mother somewhat guiltily asks him to turn down the stereo, he turns it up...
...The only other crime in the story comes later, after Johnny dies of burns suffered trying to save a group of small children from a fire...
...It is true neither boy has a father, but their world is not without positive influences...
...Kill him...
...The question is, from where...
...Faithfully re-created in a new film by Francis Ford Coppola, The Outsiders is the story, of two teenage gangs in Tulsa, Oklahoma: the middle-class "Socs" and the lower-class "Greasers...
...Small gestures, but brought off by Penn, they place Bad Boys on a completely different footing from The Outsiders...
...He is meant to provide comic relief, but his style is so out of context it almost destroys the film...
...And as befits the sensibility of 16-year-old novelists -and apparently Coppola as well- the poor respond to this taunting with noble sadness, noble resentment, and noble defiance...
...His girlfriend is raped by Paco, and Mick escapes to flee to her side, only to be picked up by the world-weary social worker who's been trying to talk sense into him...
...I'm not sure that this ending means Mick has reformed...
...But it is a triumph that we feel, consistently throughout this movie, that he has a choice...
...In a way which seems unlikely in Tulsa, or indeed anywhere else in America, this conflict is without ethnic or cultural dimension...
...But throughout it all, Sean Penn's performance remains the opposite of melodramatic...
...And the place is dominated by a pair of sadistic trusties who murder the other newcomer after he objects to being raped...
...Of course no actor can convey the abstract concept of free will, but there are degrees to which actors can appear to be the conscious authors of their own fates...
...Having seen The Outsiders, and any number of other j.d...
...It may be a flaw that we can't quite fathom the reasons for his final choice...
...Mick and another new arrival face a gauntlet of clapping, chanting, spitting abuse just to walk to their cells...
...Evil will creep in...
...There is a false note, a rather serious one, in the person of Mick's Jewish-comedian cellmate, played by Eric Gurry...
...There is no tension and very little drama, because although they are "branded by society," we know that none of these adorable angels is capable of doing anything wrong...
...Mad with grief and class resentment, Dallas robs a store and allows himself to be shot, somewhat gratuitously, by the police...
...Like the taken-at-school photographs which sometimes appear in newspapers alongside reports of teenage crime, these pictures show only the juvenile-not the delinquent...
...But the film lavishes too much attention on their physical appearance, expressed through stylized, overly choreographed posturing and horseplay...
...A he other juvenile delinquent film of the season, Bad Boys, directed by Rick Rosenthal, actually begins on a similar note: a succession of snapshots of the main characters as infants, toddlers, preadolescents...
...He narrows his eyes, lights a joint, and begins to play with his gun...
...Before they know it, they are in a shootout, and as Mick drives away, he runs over Paco's 8-year-old brother...
...these young actors' efforts to convey innocent suffering through Bryl-creem, ripped T-shirts, and tight jeans end up making them look vacant but sensual, like Jordache ads or gay pornography...
...Mick's mother may be promiscuous, and he may come from the wrong side of the El, but these facts don't make his choices for him...
...Our first glimpse of Mick is through the smashed glass of a car window, as he reaches in to snatch a lady's purse...
...and Johnny, an unwanted child whose parents beat him whenever the Socs aren't doing so...
...It's all quite melodramatic, especially as the tension mounts toward the final confrontation-the inmates placing bets, the audience presumably on the edge of their seats...
...He never wavers from that early impression of conscious, willed distance between his circumstances and his actions...
...One look at Sean Penn, who plays Mick O'Brien in Bad Boys, and we see immediately what is missing in The Outsiders...
...Mick's girlfriend, whom he loves, tells him he is foolish and reckless, and he knows she is right...
...Then he roughs up a man who tries to chase him, buys a gun, and proceeds with a plan to rip off some black and Hispanic drug dealers...
...Rare indeed is the j.d...
...Evil creeps, trickles, and frequently gushes in from the environment-parents, peers, society-to do its corrupting work on the unsullied clay of youth...
Vol. 16 • June 1983 • No. 6
