Out In The Corner Boy Night- With S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders In Mind

Out In The Corner Boy Night- With S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders In Mind  

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

The Outsiders, starring Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise and a billion brat pack guys, from the novel of the same by S.E. Hinton, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1983

Jack Callahan was not much into films, never had been, had always done the movie bit when he was dating Chrissie McNamara in high school because she had insisted before he had gotten his driver’s license that they could not always go to the seawall at the far end of Adamsville Beach to “make out” and needed the “privacy” of the balcony at the Strand Theater up on Beale Street once in a while (that Chrissie initial match-up whom he eventually married and is still married to is a story in its own right but for another time). Had insisted as well that they occasionally go to the drive-in theater, usually as a double date, to save her, their, reputations by not always being seen at that far end of Adamsville Beach, the local lovers’ lane with the fogged up car windshields and the discarded condoms on the ground, every freaking night. So he might have seen a bunch of films but he really did not pay attention all that much to plot or nuance. So it was odd that recently when Chrissie ordered the DVD of Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s classic tale of teen alienation and angst, corner boy version, The Outsiders, through Netflix for them to watch one Saturday night when they were not minding the grandkids after she had read the blurb of what the film was about that he was totally mesmerized by what he saw from frame number one.  

The reason Jack was fascinated was obvious, obvious if you knew Jack, or rather knew Jack back in his coming of age days in the early 1960s when despite his hard-fought status as a wild man running back for the championship Red Raiders high school football team and thus a hero on those lovely granite grey autumn Saturday afternoons at Veterans’ Stadium he was nothing but an in-your-face corner boy under the command of corner boy leader Frankie Riley, a true wild boy in his own right. While today Jack Callahan is Mister Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts (and Chrissie Mrs. Toyota) with his busy car dealership down in Hingham and a respectable and doting grandfather (don’t use that word with his children though they would laugh in your face) back then he was as likely to be doing a midnight creep to burgle some Mayfair swell home as to be running over awestruck on the field football defenders. After they had watched the film Jack, a drink of white wine in his hand (in the old days nothing by low-rent rotgut whiskies when he was poor and high-end Chivas when he started making money), he surprised Chrissie by wanting to unburden himself of what he saw. Chrissie, knowing this was important to Jack as she always did when on those rare occasions he felt like expanding on some subject sat there in smiling silence (and also was ready in listen in silence already knowing of Jack’s corner boy exploits with that damn Frankie Riley whom she never told Jack had made a million passes at her, a couple of those times when she almost took the ride, took Frankie’s ride, before she reined him in Senior year when that State U football scholarship was on the line).             

Jack started off waxing philosophical something he was organically incapable of in the old days by saying, “Hey, even corner boys need their fun, need an outlet for all that fury that they have inside them since they came into a world that they had no say in creating. Of course we all come into the world that way with no say but the difference is these guys, my guys if you want to know, came in with the short end of the stick, came in with small voices getting dimmer like that guy you made me read one time because you thought I would like what he had to say, Algren right [Chrissie: right], and that made all the difference. Take Pony Boy, a good looking kid, young, too young to be a corner boy just like I was at twelve when Frankie Riley first took me under his wing but what are you going to do when the deck is stacked against you and everything around you is divided into corner boys and the others. Pony Boy was trying to break out and the only way he had to do that was to write his brains out, putting it down on paper. You know me I could never do that writing stuff so before as you always say “took me in hand” I was putty in Frankie’s hands. No, I really wanted to do what I did because my wanting habits would have filled a stadium, maybe more.”

“Karl Marx was nothing but a creep and a damn red like that mad man Lenin and crazy Trotsky back then now too if anybody still pays the slightest attention to what those guys had to say and I hope they don’t  but he was a great guy for throwing class-based terms around when you think about it called Pony’s people, my people, my poor father going from pillar to post taking any job he could find to keep me and my four younger sisters from the poor house and my mother filling donuts, Jesus, filling donuts at Java Joe’s Coffee Shop to help out, the workers and the others, the capitalists, or their legion of hangers-on like your damn father, the damn bank executive, who hated me from day one because he felt I didn’t have any “prospects” before I rolled over opposing football teams, really the proletariat and the bourgeoisie if you wanted to get pretty about it.”

“This S.E. Hinton who wrote the book and I think I will go to the library and take it out when I take little Johnny and Jasmine there next week or whoever wrote the screenplay really cut it another way, the “greasers” coming hard out of hot rod cars and oil- stained gas stations all slicked up just like we were although they really did wear their hair way too long out in the sticks so maybe they didn’t have barber shops there where they lived and the “socs,” your people really you know from Beech Street like you.    The guys with the expensive sweaters and slacks not from Robert Hall or Walmart and the gals with their cashmere sweaters, starched white collar shirts, you know what I mean, and flouncy skirts just like you [Chrissie laughed.], oh yeah, and their no touch church books in hand just when thing got interesting on Friday night. [Chrissie laughs again then silently blushed thinking about that first time she let Jack “do the do,” have sex with her, as they used to call it in North Adamsville under the influence of a Howlin’ Wolf song when it was not clear who was jumping who or whom.]  Call it greaser and soc but it was all the same as Marx called it just a younger version waiting to take over. And there the lines still stand whether in our growing up hometown of North Adamsville, down in Carver with Sam Eaton, New York City, Chicago, Baton Rouge or Podunk, Oklahoma where Pony Boy and crowd were trying to breathe.”                                               

“You saw how it played out in Oklahoma but you know as well as I do it really could have been all of the other places mentioned in the hard-ass young and lost early 1960s when the whole world, or at least the whole American world, make that the whole American up-ward mobile middle class world was worried that their sons would wind up as corner boys and, more importantly that their virtuous daughters, you, would wind up in some back seat or down at some forlorn lovers’ lane with one of the refugees.” [Chrissie silently blushed again remembering that scene in Salducci’s Pizza Parlor where Frankie, Jack and the boys hung out on dough-less, girl-less Friday nights when she came clamoring in “no holds barred” and plopped herself on Jack’s lap daring him to kick her off after she got tired of him not responding to her come hither pleas.]

“Yeah, it played out every which way but here is where the whole thing tumbles. Do you remember the first scenes that take place in that nicely democratic Drive-In movie theater? [Chrissie nods.] They aren’t around much anymore except out in Podunk places like Olde Saco, Maine where my old friend Josh Breslin, an old corner boy himself hanging around with working class French-Canadian mill guys where he grew up recently checked out the remnants of that scene in that still operating venue up there although he said a lot like who was there, mostly families with kids, and the fact you had to tune into a radio station to hear the sound rather than the loudspeaker that you put on the side window of your car half the time especially if you were drunk or sleepy you would rip out when you went to drive off had changed, but back in the early 1960s as you know they along with drive-in restaurants were magnets for teens, all teens, earlier really but that was toddler time and I only want to talk about teenage coming of age time now since I am talking about corner boys.”

“Jesus, whoever figured it out either knew the scene personally or had it checked out pretty nicely, had the whole scene pegged, pegged right. Pony Boy, hey we all had monikers, all the guys, back then right, mine if you remember for a while was Running Bear after the song not because of my football prowess, Buzz, the Frankie Riley of the gang, and the ill-fated runt of the litter Johnny snuck under the fence in the back of the drive-in. Automatically that tells you if the “greaser” hair-dos and cut-off tee-shirts don’t that these guys are “from hunger” even if they had the dough for admission. One of the “perks” of being poor is that you don’t worry about the niceties of paying except when John Law is on your back because you figure the world owes you. I know I did when I first started doing the “clip” and later when we were hitting those Mayfair swell houses.

“So they walk in like they own the place, smoking cigarettes anxiously a mile a minute like we used to do. I remember that first time you smoked that Camel I offered you and you choked and almost turned blue. Although that didn’t stop us from lighting up a blade for years after and it took a civil war practically to get you, then me, to quit, quit for good. They go sit in the public seats that every drive-in had back then when the cars got too hot or your date wasn’t. [Chrissie smiles no blush this time.]  Along the way a classic drive-in scene developed remember when a bunch of kids popped out of the trunk of a big ass old car like they made back then. Some Ford or Chevy. Every group of kids pulled that trick at least once. You never let me do it when we double-dated though. Remember we used to pay separate admissions until the management got wise so everybody would pile kids in trunks and back seat wells and pay maybe two admissions then split everything later. Frankie Riley one time, this is before you landed on my lap in Salducci’s, drove into the freaking drive-in like he was by himself one time, the drive-in alone if you can believe that. The guy had balls, no question. [Chrissie: severe look.] Paid one admission and the taker didn’t blink. We had five guys and two girls in back that night. Beautiful. [Chrissie puts on her classic scorn look which after forty some years told Jack to move on quickly from that subject.] That was great until the balloon burst and you paid by the carload.”

“So naturally Buzz the leader of the pack just like Frankie  started hitting on a couple of “soc” girls, you know the ones with the starched shirts like you then and not the ones with the form-fitting cashmere sweaters who are helping fog up some back seat windows far away from the open air seat crowd. [Chrissie silently blushed again thinking about that night when Jack was away at a college tour and she took up Frankie’s good friend offer to go to the Drive-In, the back end fogged up area, and after a couple of drinks she almost let him have his way with her but jumped out just like Scarlett or whatever her name was in the movie. Frankie could be very smooth when he wanted to be, when he wanted something especially when he knew she and Jack had already been “doing the do.”]

“No go, no go between greaser and soc even in the democratic Drive-In. Why? Because the social order in school would not permit such an outlandish arrangement. Even when Pony Boy, who played it cool, took that good-looking redheaded soc to the inevitable intermission stand with its stale popcorn, fizz-less sodas, cardboard hamburgers and sullen hot dogs [Chrissie laughed a knowing laugh.] he felt uncomfortable staying too long because people might talk, meaning the inevitable teenage “grapevine” would be hot off the wire. You know from just that scene they there are two different worlds working to a bad end.” [Chrissie knew because she had had to endure not only the “no prospects” noise from her parents which was bad enough but also from her soc girlfriends for a while, especially sophomore year when all social relationships are cemented for the life of the class until graduation. Only when Jack started ripping defenses apart on Saturday afternoons and a couple of those girlfriends wondered out loud what he would be like in bed did that noise die down, did Jack get some acceptance from her crowd but she always had to watch her step, watch out that they did not find out about the midnight creeps and the other stuff that let Jack have dough to take her out without snide comment.]    

“After that scene you can tell no matter what somebody, some greaser is going to take a fall.  That is the screen-writer part to make the story interesting so they build up the tensions between the soc and greaser guys, build it up into a war practically. Along the way ill-fated Johnny trying to save Pony Boy does in a soc, kills him and that part leads away from my experiences but back on the corner we heard about one gang doing in another, having rumbles and stuff but it was corner against corner, greaser against greaser okay, not one class against the other, it just didn’t happen. You know the soc guys at school were creampuffs, were afraid of their own shadows, would walk, hell, run across the street if they saw two corner boys walking their way. I had to laugh at that part. If you hadn’t landed on my lap that night I probably would have found some sexy cashmere sweater greaser girl famous for blowjobs and bitchiness, and that would have been that. I wasn’t looking for soc girls although you know I was looking for you all the times we talked in class and everything.” [Chrissie thought just then or Ellen or Marie, a couple of her more adventurous soc girlfriends, the wonderers, would have jumped on his lap no question.]

“You know though despite the differences in the story line from what you know was happening to me before you stepped in that lead character, that Buzz, really reminded me of Frankie Riley, reminded me of how that bloody son of bitch Irishman’s son tempted the fates, tempted his fates. [Chrissie turned pale. This is the moment she has dreaded all evening since very early on she could tell Jack was working in his mind the very real similarities between Buzz, played by Matt Dillon who looked very much like Frankie, too much.] Frankie early on, hell, in junior high started out to be the king hell corner boy, was the guy who started half the guys in school smoking because it was “cool,” started the “clip,” and was the mastermind behind the Mayfair swells midnight creeps although Peter Markin was the guy who carried the plans out because Frankie was usually too drunk to lead the expeditions.”

“You know how persuasive Frankie could be, how much of a cutting edge charmer he could be if he put his mind to it and it was in his interest. I know he was after you, or thought about it, thought about it for a second until I told him I would cut his heart out and hand it to him on a platter if he did so after that night you landed on my lap.” [Chrissie blushed her seventh blush thinking again about that Drive-In episode senior year when Frankie had half her clothes off and his hand moving up her thigh toward her vagina and if he had made it before she bailed out who knows what would have happened for she believed Jack really would have done murder and mayhem to Frankie no matter what binds tied them together.]

“Yeah, the Buzzes and Frankies of the world always try to go way outside their comfort zones, try to go outside the small pond they rule. Buzz pulled some hare-brained half thought out robbery and wound up very dead in the sullen stinking oil-soaked streets of Podunk, Oklahoma. Frankie, rest his soul, wound up face down in North Carolina, Ashville, after getting a serious cocaine habit a few years out of high school and after pulling a couple of small armed robberies when he “high as a kite” tried to rob a White Hen convenience store unarmed. [Chrissie sighed, yes, rest in peace, Frankie, rest in peace.]