Based upon the novel by S.E. Hinton
Screenplay Written by S.E. Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
When I first saw this film during its original release at the age of 14, I can honestly say that I just didn't get it at all. Yes, I understood the basic storyline of the angry, restless Rusty James and his angry, restless adolescence but once the film was all said and done, I just did not understand a whit about the actual point of the overall piece itself.
Part of the joy of sitting in the dark and enveloping yourself with the movies is being engaged with the act of finding yourself lost within a story, where you somehow find either traces or full representations of yourself inside of the characters being reflected back at you. But, there are those times where the magic of the movies is contained in the act of being able to live vicariously through lives that are completely different than your own, and perhaps lives you would never envision for yourself in the real world. As I have have said many times before and I am certain I will say many times again in the future, movies, at their very best, exist as luxuriously as dreams. In my real life, I happen to be a man who has never actually had that many male friends as I tend to find much more in common and comfort in the company of women. But, in the movies, I have had this unexplainable fascination with certain rites of passage as they relate to groups of men, be it war films, crime dramas, boarding school excursions, bad boy comedies or even stories set within the world of gang culture.
While my entire sense of being, which is more than a little cautious and savvy enough to be far, far away from dangerous situations, enlisting myself inside of the violent world of gang life was never to be an issue for me growing up in Chicago. But I did harbor a certain, and albeit vehemently trepidacious fascination with this specialized culture of brothers in arms. So, within the space of one week back in March of 1983, I saw Director Rick Rosenthal's intensely brutal (and filmed in Chicago) juvenile prison drama "Bad Boys," a film that alerted me instantly that Sean Penn was the finest actor of his generation. The other film I saw was "The Outsiders," Director Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of the classic S.E. Hinton novel. By the time "Rumble Fish," Coppola's second Hinton adaptation, which was filmed back-to-back with "The Outsiders," was released that fall, I was more than ready to take that plunge into male driven, teenage fueled honor among thieves once again but when I emerged from the experience, I was more than a little confused. The cinematic language that Coppola spoke with throughout "Rumble Fish" was presented in so foreign of a fashion, I felt as if I had been viewing a foreign film! Whatever was commercial and accessible about "The Outsiders" was nowhere to be seen or felt within "Rumble Fish." The overall ambiguity and flat out strangeness of the experience kept me at arms length, even though it did intrigue me and it did afford a couple more frustrating viewings during my High School years. And furthermore, I could not for the life of me figure out the symbolism behind any images of fish being presented in color while the rest of the film remained in starkly photographed black and white.
Now, over 25 years later, after a chance reunion on cable television, I have seen "Rumble Fish" through my adult and much more cinematically informed eyes. The emotions this film returned to me, plus the new ones that have emerged, compelled me to write this latest edition of "Savage Cinema Revisits," which I hope will compel you to seek this completely unique film experience out for yourselves. Where "The Outsiders" was a crowd pleaser, "Rumble Fish"exists as an audacious, impressionistic art film, the very kind of risky film experiment and experience that only someone on the level of Francis Ford Coppola could devise. This is an urgent, bracing, dreamlike film that is unlike anything else and even after almost 30 years since its release, it is still five minutes ahead of everything else.
The dangerously pretty and ferociously charismatic Matt Dillon stars as the aforementioned angry, restless Rusty James, an Oklahoma teen who undergoes a pivotal odyssey over the course of "Rumble Fish." The child of an alcoholic Father (Dennis Hopper) and a long absent Mother, Rusty James shares an alternately tender and tumultuous relationship with Catholic school girlfriend Patty (Diane Lane) and hungrily prowls through his existence, hoping to touch the past street and gang life glories previously attained by his legendary and long departed older brother, The Motorcycle Boy (an enigmatic Mickey Rourke). When one gang fight too many leaves Rusty James seriously injured, The Motorcycle Boy returns to his rescue, an act that propels Rusty James towards his life's turning point.
I have to say that watching "Rumble Fish" again after all of this time, my feelings initially remained as they were back in 1983. I was mesmerized but just confused. Stylistically, Francis Ford Coppola has created a stunningly captivating canvas made up of spare parts from the French New Wave cinema of Jean-Luc Goddard and the German Expressionism of Fritz Lang. While the film is indeed shot in stark black and white cinematography like those aforementioned film genres, "Rumble Fish" is somehow as visually lush as a 1950's melodrama. On another yet similar technical level in regards to the cinema of the 1950s, the spoken dialogue cadences throughout "Rumble Fish," to my ear, echoed the likes of Director Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without A Cause" (1955) or Director Douglas Sirk's "Written On The Wind" (1956). Although I am remarking about the film styles and genres of the era prior to Coppola's film, I should note that "Rumble Fish" is not designed as a period piece as it does appear to take place within the (then) present day, especially when you have the very modern, up to the minute innovative soundtrack from Composer/Percussionist Stewart Copeland (more on that unique element a bit later). And yet, the film is not plot driven, parts are decidedly non-linear and one section is entirely...oh, shall we say...out of body. It is through those particular dreamlike qualities that make the film appear as if the entire thing may be taking place inside of Rusty James' mind.
Despite all of this cinematic razzle dazzle, I was still finding myself unable to get a real handle upon everything that I was watching and therefore, I was again finding it difficult to care very much about Rusty James and his dilemmas. But then, there was one short moment set inside of Benny's Billiards, a teen hangout operated by Benny (played by Tom Waits). In a striking shot, a clock sits at the closest forefront of the frame while Benny speaks to an unknown listener, maybe the audience or perhaps no one at all. He mutters and stammers about the nature of time and how slowly it moves when you are a child but once you grow up, you begin to wonder how many summers you may happen to have remaining. "35 summers left," Benny muses solemnly. "35 summers..."
And with that, the puzzle pieces of "Rumble Fish" finally began to click into place. Possibly what Francis Ford Coppola has done with S.E. Hinton's original story was to take the genre of teen angst and gang violence and use them as catalysts to create and explore something more philosophical. Quite possibly, "Rumble Fish" is a treatise and existential musing on the elusiveness, elasticity and overall illusion of time itself. And for Rusty James, time is an especially mischievous demon as he cannot ever outrun it or keep up with it and he seems to be always out of step with it. He longs for a gang culture that has passed him by as he is nostalgic for periods he was too young to experience himself. Coppola's imagery of fast moving clouds, looming and hulking shadows and the signposts of clocks are prevalent throughout "Rumble Fish" as visual reminders of the world spinning endlessly, without empathy or regard for whatever Rusty James may be waiting for.
This aspect of the relentless nature of time I felt was captured astonishingly well by Stewart Copeland's music score, which is indeed one of my favorite film scores of all time. Copeland is truly and dearly one of my musical heroes as his performances as the drummer/percussionist of The Police awed me and continues to do so to this day. With his film score for "Rumble Fish," Copeland, for my perceptions (especially as a drummer myself), re-wrote the rules for what a drummer could actually be. Working in terrific collaboration with Coppola, Stewart Copeland created mystical, feverish and entirely rhythmic extensions of Rusty James' soul. Just listen to the the backgrounds of the scenes as you watch this film and hear the continuous loops of percolating mini-cymbals, electronic beats, menacing marimba patterns, drum kits merged with the likes of typewriters, heavy machinery, ticking clocks and car horns, all of which underscore Rusty James' tumultuous life. Whether he is in violent motion during a gang fight, laying injured in repose, feeling tired and falling asleep on Patty's couch after a healthy make-out session, or internally lashing out at the world as he waits and waits for a sense of understanding or even spiritual deliverance, time marches onwards, refusing to wait for him to figure out and decide upon being the person he wishes to become. Stewart Copeland's score is a masterful achievement of sound, musicality and commitment to enhancing the process of creating a character and his cinematic journey.
Rusty James' urgent inner search for the person he thinks he should be and how that compares and conflicts with the person he actually is was a theme that just was not obvious to me when I first saw the film due to its cinematic extravagances. In addition to that theme plus the nature of time, I also now think that we are witnessing Rusty James' struggles with his overall romantic view of his world (however misguided) vs. the reality of his world. He carries a romantic view of the violent gang life even when his sidekicks Smokey (Nicholas Cage), B.J. (the late Christopher Penn) and the studious Steve (Vincent Spano) all reject it. Rusty James is bested in every fight sequence we see him involved with, suggesting that he is just not tough enough for the world he claims to crave. The Motorcycle Boy's return is especially crucial for Rusty James' story because we can see that the enigmatic Motorcycle Boy has undertaken the exact same journey for himself.
The identity of The Motorcycle Boy remains one of the largest mysteries contained in Coppola's "Rumble Fish." We know very little about him and we never even learn his real name. We don't know why he abandoned his life in Oklahoma or why he decided to find a potentially brighter future in California. We can infer many things but we never really know why Officer Patterson (William Smith) seeks supreme vengeance against The Motorcycle Boy. We never really know what The Motorcycle Boy's life was like in California, although I have been housing a suspicion that he just may be homosexual, due to a sultry magazine photograph that was taken of him.
While we do not know much about The Motorcycle Boy, that lack of concrete knowledge does not diminish his overall purpose in regards to Rusty James. While his violent past has left him colorblind, deaf in one ear and an appearance that makes him look much older than his 21 years, The Motorcycle Boy is mostly consumed with massive regrets, conflicting emotions about his legendary status and an equally urgent desire to save the life of his younger brother, who idolizes him for all of the wrong reasons. If he is to indeed save Rusty James' life, The Motorcycle Boy needs to shatter his brother's romantic notions in the way he most likely destroyed similar notions within himself, making "Rumble Fish" a riveting tale about brotherly love and responsibility to each other.
Dear readers, please take a moment and ponder about the films you have seen throughout your lives that maybe did not make much of an impression upon you initially but have grown in stature over the years. As often the case with music, I do believe that movies sometimes choose the viewer, reaching out for you at just the right time and place in your lives, where full acceptance and understanding is at the ready. This chance reunion with Francis Ford Coppola's "Rumble Fish," while completely unexpected, was enormously rewarding and I am sincerely hoping that this edition of "Savage Cinema Revisits" will encourage you to check this film out for yourselves, either again or for the very first time.
I guarantee that you haven't seen anything quite like it.
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