385 - Rumble Fish, United States, 1983. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola.

Saturday, January 20, 2018

385 - Rumble Fish, United States, 1983.  Dir. Francis Ford Coppola.

The fish would not fight if they were in the river.  If they had room to live.

The Motorcycle Boy is explaining his theory to Officer Patterson.  As they confront one another in the pet shop.

The fish are Siamese fighting fish.  Commonly known as Betta fish.  The Betta males are alpha males.  They fight.  They rumble.  They kill each other.  They are rumble fish.

Like the street gangs here in Tulsa.

Officer Patterson does not trust The Motorcycle Boy and has been pursuing him for some time.

He tells him, "Someone ought to get you off the streets."

The Motorcycle Boy replies, "Someone ought to put the fish in the river."

Maybe the boys would not fight if they had room to live.

The Motorcycle Boy is Rusty James' older brother.  Rusty James looks up to him.  Idolizes him.  He was the leader of the gang.  He always knew what to do.  And he was cool.

But The Motorcycle Boy called a truce and disappeared.  They have not seen him for two months.  So when Midget tells Rusty James that gang rival Biff Wilcox wants to rumble, Rusty James says bring it on.  His friends Smokey, B.J., and Steve will be there, though they are more hesitant than he is.  But Rusty James is taking on the mantle of his big brother.  He will be confident.  He will not let them down.

Rusty James takes time to swing by his girlfriend Patty's house beforehand for a little dalliance.  Then he shows up to take care of business.  He wins the rumble but gets gashed in the side by a glass shard when he looks up to see that his big brother has arrived.  The Motorcycle Boy comes to his rescue by dispatching his bike into Biff, sending him soaring into the air.

The brothers are united, and they spend the next night roaming the streets of Tulsa, philosophizing about life and trying not to get killed.  They run into their alcoholic father in the bar.  He is happy to see them, and they chat, but then the boys go back out on their own.

The Motorcycle Boy is old now.  21 years old.  He is color blind and has grown hard of hearing.  He has started to think more abstractly, even incoherently, and he is pursuing peace.

He went to California during his two-month absence, and he found their mother.  She had left their father and run off with a movie producer.

The Motorcycle Boy did not quite make it to the ocean when he was in California, but he observes that the Arkansas River goes all the way to the ocean (via the Mississippi), and he implores Rusty James to leave this life behind him, to take The Motorcycle Boy's motorcycle and follow the river.  If he does so, he will make it to the ocean and be free.

By now they have spent the night going from open-air concert to dance party to Benny's Billiards to a back alley--where Rusty James has been killed and floated above his body and come back to life--and they are returning to the pet store for one final showdown.

All the world of the film appears in sharp black and white, except for the fish.  The fish are bright red and blue.

Michael Smuin from the San Francisco Ballet choreographed the rumble sequences, giving them a balletic style.

Stewart Copeland, drummer of The Police, composed the soundtrack, creating his own looped layers of percussive sound.  The clicking and ticking of clocks and heartbeats and typewriters and car horns and pile drivers.  And of course drums.

Time is a funny thing.

Tom Waits as Benny, the owner of Benny's Billiards, delivers a monologue on time.

"Time is a very peculiar item.  You see, when you're young, you're a kid, you've got time.  You've got nothing but time.  Throw away a couple of years here, a couple of years there, it doesn't matter, you know?  The older you get, you say, 'Jesus, how much I got?  I got thirty-five summers left.'  Think about it.  Thirty-five summers."

From the moment Lawrence Fishburne as Midget informs Matt Dillon as Rusty James that Biff Wilcox is looking for him, Rusty James' clock starts ticking.

Rusty James is running out of time.  He is living on Tulsa time.

And the film is filled with ticking clocks to remind us.  It has more clocks than Flavor Flav.  It's clockin'.

Francic Ford Coppola has been balancing Hollywood movies with art house cinema throughout his career, going back to the 1960s.

Hollywood - Finian's Rainbow, 1968, Warner Bros., Fred Astaire
Art House - The Rain People, 1969, American Zoetrope, James Caan
Hollywood - The Godfather, 1972, Paramount, Marlon Brando
Art House - The Conversation, 1974, The Directors Company, Gene Hackman

Here he does it again with two S.E. Hinton young-adult novels filmed back to back in Tulsa.

Hollywood - The Outsiders, 1983, Zoetrope Studios/Warner Bros., high gloss, full color
Art House - Rumble Fish, 1983, Zoetrope Studios/Universal, black and white, expressionistic

And as with The Outsiders, he brings in an ensemble cast of strong actors.  Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, Diane Lane, Dennis Hopper, Diana Scarwid, Vincent Spano, Nicolas Cage, Chris Penn, Laurence Fishburne, William Smith, Michael Higgins, Glenn Withrow, Tom Waits, Sofia Coppola (Domino!).

They wrote the script on their Sundays off while filming The Outsiders.  They storyboarded the film.  They drew it with an electronic chalk board.  They filmed it on video with the actors in front of blue screen.  They painted shadows on walls and buildings.  They created a human rotisserie for Rusty James to fly and be turned on.  They filmed color fish through clear water and rear projected black and white footage.

This film is poetic, expressionistic, mythological, existential, balletic, personal, and beautiful.

He dedicates it to August Coppola, his own big brother.

How great that Francis Ford Coppola started by responding to a group of students who wrote to him and asked him to make a movie of their favorite book, The Outsiders.  Then while making it he asked S.E. Hinton what else she had.  And he understood her novel Rumble Fish when he read it.  According to her, he was one of the few who did.

This is Francis Ford Coppola's "art film for teenagers."

It is his art film for everyone.


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And neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother crazy.  He's merely miscast in a play.  He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river, with the ability to be able to do anything he wants to do and finding nothing that he wants to do. - Dennis Hopper as Father.

We were all working for someone who demanded innovation. - Stewart Copeland of Francis Ford Copppola.