Francis Ford Coppola's second adaptation of an S. E. Hinton novel has embraced the legacy of German Expressionism all the way to the black-and-white photography, a bit further, in a sense, than he went in the first, The Outsiders. Ostensibly the black-and-white takes its cue from the character of The Motorcycle Boy, who is color-blind. He is also, owing to the ravages of countless street fights, half deaf, and this accounts for another stylistic oddity: the muted, often indistinct dialogue, which sounds as though you had just emerged from the swimming pool with water in your ears, or as though the Orson Welles of The Trial and The Immortal Story had been in charge of dubbing. And the self-consciously literary symbols, of a sort that have dampened many a high-schooler's interest in literature, all have their meaning in reference to him: clocks with or without hands, the river, and the titular fish which are pictured in phosphorescent color -- the only such daubs in the whole movie, outside of the flashing light atop a police car -- and which feature prominently in the climactic pet-store liberation. But the action of the movie is not perceived precisely through the eyes (and ears) of The Motorcycle Boy: he is not on the scene often enough to justify such devices all the time. His main idolizer, and the legitimate central character, is his younger brother, Rusty-James. And all of the specifically subjective experiences in the movie are the latter's. Whatever their rationale, however, the stylistic effects in this movie come at you hot and heavy. And they leave you cold and unbudged: so unrelenting as to be utterly uncalculating. Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, Diane Lane. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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