The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Francis Ford Coppola · a film · 1983 · about 94 minutes · written by S. E. Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola, from Hinton’s novel · the released cut
Mode
Teenage picture made as an expressionist elegy; family drama and street legend in one
Mythos
The fallen prince come back from exile who will not take his crown; the damaged seer; the hero who dies to free the follower
Phase
From a challenge in a pool hall to a shot in the street, framed by clouds racing over the town and closed at the edge of the Pacific
Presentation
Feature film in black and white with colour inserts, about 94 minutes; Stephen H. Burum’s photography, Dean Tavoularis’s design, Stewart Copeland’s percussion score
Register
From pool-hall comedy to a death played as a myth’s close; cold, slow and stylised, with a pulse in place of a swell
Scale
Two brothers, a father, and a few streets on the wrong side of a river
Governing Proposition
A boy in Tulsa wants to be what his elder brother was, the leader of a gang, and the brother comes home having already given up the legend the boy wants. The wager of the film is that a teenage picture can be made as an elegy in black and white, the world seen as the colour-blind brother sees it, and that a town where boys fight because they are kept in it can be shown as a tank of fighting fish, broken only by the fish themselves.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with the sky. Clouds race over Tulsa in time-lapse, faster than any weather, and the sky is a clock before there is a character. Clocks and watches stand in frame from then on, and Stewart Copeland’s percussion runs under much of the action like a mechanism keeping time. The image is black and white, deep in shadow, full of smoke and steam, shot through wide lenses that bend the streets. Time is the medium the boys are kept in, and the film shows it before it says anything else.
The boy at its centre is Rusty James, played by Matt Dillon, who wants to be what his elder brother was: the leader of a gang, in a town where the gangs have gone. The brother, known only as the Motorcycle Boy and played by Mickey Rourke, has been away, and his name is still on the walls: “The Motorcycle Boy Reigns”. Their father, played by Dennis Hopper, drinks and lives on welfare; their mother has gone. Patty, played by Diane Lane, is Rusty James’s girl. Around them are Steve, played by Vincent Spano; Smokey, played by Nicolas Cage; Midget, played by Laurence Fishburne; Benny, played by Tom Waits, who keeps the pool hall; and Patterson, the policeman, played by William Smith.
Coppola directed it from a screenplay he wrote with S. E. Hinton, after her novel Rumble Fish (1975). It was a Zoetrope Studios production, shot on location in Tulsa in 1982 directly after The Outsiders (1983), with much of the same company, at a time when the studio was failing after One from the Heart (1982). Stephen H. Burum photographed it, Dean Tavoularis designed it, Barry Malkin cut it, and Fred Roos and Doug Claybourne produced it. Universal released it in the United States in October 1983, about ninety-four minutes long, in black and white with colour inserts. It failed commercially.
Movement II
In Benny’s pool hall Rusty James learns that Biff Wilcox, played by Glenn Withrow, means to fight him, and he takes the challenge as a part he has been waiting to play. The pool hall is staged as comedy: Biff’s posturing, Smokey’s opportunism, the talk of boys who know the rules of a game no one plays any more. Benny’s talk runs under all of it. The fight is set for night, in a lot under the railway.
Between the challenge and the fight there is Patty, and the film lets the hours pass slowly. Then the night, the railway lot, hard light through steam, and a fight that is broken off. The Motorcycle Boy arrives out of the dark into the middle of it, a figure of legend entering a schoolyard brawl, and the brawl cannot go on with him there. Rusty James has wanted his brother back, and he has him back at the moment he is playing his brother’s part.
The man who has come home is not the one the walls describe. He is soft-voiced, absent and courteous; he is colour-blind and partly deaf, and the world the film shows, without colour and with its sound turned down, is the world as he sees it. Rusty James lives inside that sight without sharing what it knows. The king has come back from exile, and he does not want the crown the walls still give him.
Movement III
The brothers go home to their father’s flat. Hopper plays the father as a drunk with a drunk’s clarity: he is the one person in the film who says what the elder son is and what he costs, and it is the sharpest truth the film has. The family is a man on welfare, two sons and a mother who has gone.
Rusty James is in trouble at school, and the film treats school as a gesture. He is in trouble with Patty, and those scenes are played in a plainer manner, closer to the film made just before this one, so that the style sits on them like a surface. Smokey takes what Rusty James has, his girl and his gang, and the film tells it in a stroke and moves on, as it does with Cassandra, played by Diana Scarwid, who has two scenes. These are the threads a pared story leaves loose, and the film fills the gaps with atmosphere.
One night Rusty James walks across the river with Steve, and they are attacked and robbed. Struck down, Rusty James rises out of his body and looks down on himself in the street and on the people around him. It is the one scene in which he sees himself, and the film gives it the lightness of a dream. Then he is back in the body. The boy who wants to be a legend is shown, for a moment, from outside.
Movement IV
The Motorcycle Boy tells his brother of finding their mother in California. In his account the legend Rusty James wants is already over: the gangs of their youth are gone, and something worse has come in their place. The brother who reigns on the walls has given up the kingdom; the brother who wants it has not noticed that there is none.
In a pet shop the Motorcycle Boy stands before Siamese fighting fish, and they are in colour, red and blue, the only colour in the world of the film, seen by the one man in it who cannot see colour. Kept in the bowl, the fish fight to the death; let into the river, they will not. The town is the bowl, and the boys fight because they are kept in it. The fish are the film’s one breach of its own black and white, and everything that follows turns on them.
Patterson watches the Motorcycle Boy. The policeman’s hatred is all the law there is in the film, one man in a uniform, and the clocks go on in frame. Everything gathered now points one way: the brother who has seen the end of the legend, the boy who still believes in it, the fish behind the glass, and a policeman waiting.
Movement V
At night the Motorcycle Boy breaks into the pet shop and frees the animals. Then he is shot in the street. The hero who frees the fish dies for it, and the stylisation that made the pool hall a stage makes his death a myth’s close. The man who has been called a king on the walls of the town dies in a street of that town, having wanted none of it.
Rusty James carries the fish to the river and lets them go. Then he takes the motorcycle and rides out of the town, on to the edge of the Pacific. The brother’s death is the follower’s release: the boy who copied the legend leaves the bowl the legend was kept in, and the fish and the boy are given the same thing, open water. The ride is a release that the rest of the film has not quite prepared.
It found neither its teenage audience nor wide critical support in 1983, and the youth film of the decade went the way of John Hughes. Its standing has risen since, to a cult and a body of writing concerned mostly with its look. Beside the maker’s three films on the desk, The Godfather at 9.0, The Godfather Part II at 8.9 and Apocalypse Now at 8.8, it is a lesser thing, and it stands near The Godfather Part III at 6.4. It is sound, skilled work whose reach stayed within its moment: a cameraman’s film of the first order around a story pared to an elegy, and one thing known well, that a town can be a tank and a life can be measured out in clocks until someone carries the fish to the river.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. A spine holds: the fight brings the Motorcycle Boy back; the mugging gives Rusty James his flight above his own body, the one scene in which he sees himself; the pet shop gives the fish, and the fish give the end. The father’s scenes are required, since only he says what the elder son is and what he costs. Around that spine much is mood held at length. The time-lapse skies return more often than the argument needs; Benny’s talk, Cassandra’s two scenes and Smokey’s taking of Patty and the gang are told in a stroke and dropped; school is a gesture. The paring of the novel has left atmosphere where necessity should be.
Score: 6.0 / 10
A boy builds himself on imitating a brother who has already rejected the legend the boy wants; the legend is a prison for the man who carries it as much as for the follower; the town is a tank in which young men fight because they are kept in it, as the fish fight only in the bowl. The father’s drunken clarity about his sons is the film’s sharpest truth. But much of what the film offers is a condition felt, time running out in a world without colour, more than a meaning articulated. Rusty James’s own consciousness is thin, and the social ground of Tulsa is a backdrop. The disclosure is carried by the image more than the drama, and it stays narrow.
Score: 6.6 / 10
The elevation is real and mostly cold. Clouds race over the city at the opening, the sky made a clock; the Motorcycle Boy comes out of the dark into a street fight as a figure of legend; Rusty James is lifted out of his body above the street after the mugging; the fish are in colour, the only colour in the world, seen by the one man who cannot see it. Copeland’s score gives these a pulse rather than a swell. What holds the axis is that many heights are bought by manner. The shadows and smoke pose, some heights are of style rather than feeling, and the middle of the film flattens into hanging about, which it means to show and sometimes simply is.
Score: 6.8 / 10
The elder brother is a fallen prince of the streets, back from exile without wanting his crown, and the walls read “The Motorcycle Boy Reigns” in a kingdom he no longer believes in. He is colour-blind and partly deaf, a damaged seer; the younger brother sees in colour, hears everything and sees nothing. The fish carry the end: in the bowl they fight to the death, in the river they will not, and the hero who frees them dies so that the follower can go on to the sea. What holds the axis is inheritance. The doomed brother as a figure of Romantic youth comes from the delinquency films and from Hinton, and the film leans on him as an icon more often than it builds him in action.
Score: 6.8 / 10
The inheritance is the juvenile-delinquency film of the 1950s, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) above all, and Hinton’s own teen fiction, which The Outsiders had just adapted in a classical, sunlit manner. The turn is wide: a teenage picture made as an expressionist film in black and white, with spot colour, time-lapse skies, a percussion score in place of pop songs and a story pared to an elegy. The stake was real: it was made as Zoetrope failed after One from the Heart (1982), and it found neither its audience nor wide support at release. What holds it is borrowing. Expressionist light, spot colour and the doomed youth all had long precedents, and the turn combines them rather than finding a new grammar.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The black and white is the Motorcycle Boy’s sight, a world without colour with the sound turned down, and the film imposes it on everyone in it, so that Rusty James lives inside his brother’s perception without his understanding. The fish are the one breach, and the end turns on them. The clocks and skies make the form a measure of time running out; the score keeps time under the action. Told in colour and plainly, as The Outsiders was, the material would be a story of a gang and a family. The binding is loose, though. The camera stays mostly with Rusty James, not his brother, and the style is laid as surface over scenes, the school and Patty, that the form does not need.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Forty-three years are the evidence. The film has been returned to more than it was first received, rising from failure at release to a cult standing and a body of critical writing. On return it yields formally: the rhymes of clocks, shadows, water and the colour of the fish; the reversal of sight between the brothers; Hopper’s scenes, which read differently once the end is known. The questions left open are few: whether the Motorcycle Boy is a seer or a man destroyed, and whether the film believes his legend or only the boy’s belief. Much of the return is to a mood and a look, which do not deepen as a meaning does, and the writing dwells on its style and its place in Coppola’s career.
Score: 6.4 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. The force is real and local. The film showed that the teenage picture, the most commercial form of its decade, could be made as an avant-garde elegy in black and white with a percussion score. It did not reorganise what film could do; it carried known means into a genre that had not had them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it failed at release, the youth film of the decade followed John Hughes rather than this, and no successor can be named that redirected itself because of it; resemblance is not counted as influence. Copeland’s score stands as an early film score by a rock drummer. The later cult and critical recovery is delayed reach, credited and discounted.
Score: 6.0 / 10
The form survives whole in the released cut; restoration has repaired it without making another film. Presence across forty-three years is narrow: the film failed in cinemas in 1983, and its life since has been on home video, in repertory, on television and in a cult and critical following, its standing rising rather than falling, but it has not stayed in common view as the most exhibited films of its decade have. The black and white guards it against the colour stock and styling of 1983; the score’s electronic textures, the clothes and the hair are of their year. Decades are credited for what they have shown, with presence charged: Apocalypse Now, four years older and widely seen, stands at 8.7 here.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The making bears weight in image and sound. Burum’s photography is of the first order and would alone stand far higher: deep blacks, hard light through smoke and steam, wide lenses that bend the streets, compositions in depth. Tavoularis builds a Tulsa of alleys, railway lots and pool halls that looks found; Copeland’s score drives scenes. Rourke’s Motorcycle Boy, soft-voiced, absent and courteous, is the best performance, and Hopper’s father is exact. But the axis scores the whole command, and the charges fall on real shares: Dillon’s range is narrow for a lead who carries every scene; the dialogue is stilted in places and played as if it were poetry; some supporting playing is broad; the style decorates thin scenes. A cameraman’s film more than a commanded one.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of the pool hall, Biff Wilcox’s posturing and Smokey’s opportunism, and the shot that kills the Motorcycle Boy. One law reaches both: the boys act out a legend in a world where the legend has ended, and the stylisation that makes the pool hall a stage makes the death a myth’s close. The flight above the street and the father’s flat obey the same physics of a town seen as a dream of itself. The law strains at both ends of the range. The plain scenes of school and Patty sit uneasily inside the stylisation, as if from the companion film, and the ride to the Pacific is a release that the rest of the film’s law has not prepared.
Score: 6.7 / 10
Judged on what ninety-four minutes hold. Consciousness, in the Motorcycle Boy’s alienation, given from outside, and Rusty James’s want, given from inside but thinly; the family, in an alcoholic father on welfare, a mother gone to California and two brothers; town and class, a declining city on the wrong side of the river; the law, in Patterson’s hatred; time, in the clocks and skies; the natural order, in the fish, the river and the sea. The fish join the family, the law and the death. What holds the axis at its floor: labour is absent but for the father’s dole, the state is one policeman, the sacred is absent, the women are held at the edge, and history, the gang era already over, is glimpsed rather than entered.
Score: 6.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
6.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier II · Accomplished
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Swerve at 7.2 and The Living Form at 7.1. A film that survives whole in its one released cut and has risen in standing since its failure; a teenage picture turned into an elegy in black and white, with spot colour and a percussion score, against the grain of its decade; and a form in which the black and white is the colour-blind brother’s sight and the fish in colour are the one breach, on which the end turns.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 6.0. A spine of fight, flight and fish surrounded by mood held at length, repeated skies and threads dropped after a stroke; a reach that stayed within its moment, a failure at release with no successor that can be named; and orders of family, town and law held while labour, the state, the sacred and history are absent or glimpsed. Next above them, The Bottomless Well at 6.4, where the return is mostly to a mood and a look.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 6.0 falls short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor is unmet: The Living Form clears it at 7.1, but The Made at 6.8 and The Inner Law at 6.7 fall below 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.5 meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Swerve at 7.2, The Archetypal Deep at 6.8, The Unconcealment at 6.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 6.0 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 6.0, and Pressure on Tradition, 6.0, and at every other axis it covers but The Imperishable, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, meets its own floor of 6.0 exactly. One of the five summit conditions is met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: the twelve sum to 80.9, an average of 6.74 that rounds to 6.7, in the band of Tier II, short of the 7.0 at which Tier III begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Rumble Fish as released in the United States in October 1983 by Universal, a Zoetrope Studios production, about ninety-four minutes long, in black and white with colour inserts, from the clouds over Tulsa to the edge of the Pacific. No print, script or recording was consulted. The released cut is the object; later restorations for home video are repair, weighed under The Imperishable alone, and not a different film. S. E. Hinton’s novel Rumble Fish (1975) is the source, not the work: the film is scored on what it achieves in its own medium, and the colour of the fish is the film’s. The Outsiders (1983) is context, named only where the companion film bears on a judgment. No line of dialogue is quoted; the words on the walls are given as the film shows them. The details of the plot are given in outline, as the reading holds them. Figures that could not be verified, among them the exact release date, the aspect ratio, the budget and gross, the shot and scene counts and the share of the dialogue, are not given, and the editions of the restorations are not named.