3 Movies / November 12
Francis Ford Coppola, one of the most distinguished American filmmakers, joins TCM host Ben Mankiewicz on this special evening to introduce three of the Academy Award winner’s early works. These include The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, which was restored, re-worked by Coppola, and released in DVD and Blu-ray editions in 2005. This version was screened in theaters earlier this year. (The original film, The Outsiders, was released in 1983.)
Coppola was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1939 to musician/composer Carmine Coppola and his wife, Italia. Francis graduated with a degree in theater arts from Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY, and studied filmmaking at UCLA. His on-the-job training in movies began with producer-director Roger Corman in the early 1960s, and by 1963 Coppola was directing his own feature films. He would soon add producer and writer to his list of capabilities.
Among Coppola’s numerous honors are five Oscars: Best Story and Screenplay for Patton (1970); Adapted Screenplay for The Godfather (1972); Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay for The Godfather: Part II (1974). He was also nominated as Best Director for Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Godfather: Part III (1990). His most recent directorial credit was for Distant Vision (2016).
Below are the films in TCM’s tribute.
Dementia 13 (1963), Coppola’s first feature as writer and director, was a black-and-white horror film made for independent producer Roger Corman and released through American International Pictures. The story concerns jealousy, betrayal, murder, and a possible haunting at a family castle in Ireland.
Critic Michael Weldon wrote in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film that the movie has “a great trick ending, some truly shocking, gory axe murders, and lots of inventive photography.”
The Rain People (1969) is a moody road movie showcasing a young Shirley Knight as a pregnant housewife who heads west in the family station wagon in search of her identity. Fellow passengers include future Godfather stars James Caan and Robert Duvall.
Although not commercially successful upon its original release, The Rain People has since gained a following. Reviewing the film upon its original release, Roger Ebert compared it to Easy Rider (also 1969) and wrote that Peter Fonda’s character in that film and Knight’s housewife here are “lineal descendants of the most typical American searcher of them all, Huckleberry Finn.”
The Outsiders was Coppola’s screen version of the 1967 novel by S.E. Hinton, with a screenplay by Kathleen Rowell. The action is set in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a group of adolescent males who call themselves “greasers” are in conflict with another gang.
The film introduced or furthered the careers of an amazing group of young actors who were on the cusp of stardom and would become known collectively as the “Brat Pack.” They included C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Tom Cruise. Diane Lane also has a key role.
The Outsiders: The Complete Novel (2005) includes restored scenes that were not in the original movie, expanding the running length from 91 to 115 minutes and including some new music. The restoration was by Warner Bros., StudioCanal, and Coppola’s company, American Zoetrope.
In an introduction to the Blu-ray edition of the expanded version, Coppola speaks of a producer of the original film “who felt that the movie was too long and not emotional enough” and should get “right into the juicy scenes. So I did shorten it.” Later he regretted that decision. “So here is The Outsiders: The Complete Novel as I think it should be shown.”
Evan Jacobs, writing for MovieWeb, declares that “This new version of the film isn’t just an extended cut… It is so complete in its reimagining that it plays with the same weightiness of Coppola’s other reworking, Apocalypse Now Redux.”
