Francis Ford Coppola’s 1985 adaptation of the novel by S.E. Hinton was full of tough thugs and mean mugs — and plenty of leather jackets. The Greasers, a gang of poor, wrong-side-of-the-tracks boys played by Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio and C. Thomas Howell, live in Tulsa, Okla., where they have to fight to keep their territory from being overrun by the Socs (pronounced soashes). The Socs are wealthy, preppy jerks who don’t understand the plight of the Greasers. The two groups clash repeatedly and one of those clashes results in a fatality, sending two of the Greasers on the run. While the film is chock-full of machismo and bravado, it’s also tinged with the sentimentality and philosophical edge that made the novel a teen classic.
They were some of the best crooks in Los Angeles, thrown together in a trumped up police lineup. The men — Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), a corrupt police officer who has supposedly given up his life of crime, Michael McManus (Stephen Baldwin), a thief with a short temper, Fred Fenster (Benicio del Toro), McManus’ broken English-speaking partner, Todd Hockney (Kevin Pollack), a hijacker and Roger “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey), a small-time con who walks with a limp — unite during the lineup and decide to pull a job together. After successfully robbing “New York’s Finest Taxi Service,” a corrupt group of police officers who escort smugglers to various spots around the city, they are convinced to pull another caper. This time, they begin working for mysterious gangster Keyser Söze, a man whose bloody reputation hangs over the entire crew and the entire film.
Well, grown-ups, you no longer have to hide your copies of Harry Potter and the Whatever Whatever during your morning commute, because the author of the popular childrens book series is writing her first book for the olds.
