While serious film lovers reach for Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish as their favourite screen adaptation of an SE Hinton novel, I can never go past The Outsiders, as much for what it did to me as a gay kid growing up in the mid-80s who was terrified of being discovered as for any artistic merit.
There are cheesy things about the movie, for sure – it’s superficial wash of nostalgia for the 60s, there are a few egregious continuity errors, some rawness in the performances – but none of that matters as the opening strains of Stevie Wonder’s Stay Gold hit your ears and the cinematographer Stephen H Burum’s montage of overexposed sunsets fills the screen. The story of kids from the wrong side of the tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, always makes me, a kid who grew up in the leafy suburbs of south-east Melbourne, feel entirely at home.
