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.
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