Rumble Fish

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This article is about the film. For the novel, see Rumble Fish (novel). For other meanings, see Rumble Fish (disambiguation).
Rumble Fish

Theatrical poster
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Produced by Francis Ford Coppola
Doug Claybourne
Fred Roos
Written by S.E. Hinton (novel)
S.E. Hinton
Francis Ford Coppola (screenplay)
Starring Matt Dillon
Mickey Rourke
Diane Lane
Vincent Spano
Nicolas Cage
Dennis Hopper
Laurence Fishburne
Chris Penn
Music by Stewart Copeland
Cinematography Stephen H. Burum
Editing by Barry Malkin
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Release date(s) October 8, 1983 (USA)
Running time 94 minutes
Country Flag of the United States United States
Language English
Budget $10,000,000 (estimated)
Gross revenue $2,494,480 (USA)
Official website
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Rumble Fish is a 1983 film directed, produced and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola. It is based on the novel Rumble Fish by S.E. Hinton, who also co-wrote the screenplay. The film centers on the relationship between the Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke), a revered former gang leader, and his younger brother, Rusty James (Matt Dillon), who can't live up to his brother's great reputation, nor can his brother live it down. Coppola wrote the screenplay for the film with Hinton on his days off from shooting The Outsiders. He made the films back-to-back, retaining much of the same cast and crew. The film is notable for its avant-garde style, shot on stark high-contrast black-and-white film, using the spherical cinematographic process with allusions to French New Wave cinema and German Expressionism.[1] Rumble Fish features an experimental score by Stewart Copeland, drummer of the musical group The Police, who used a Musync, a new device at the time.

Rumble Fish was booed when it debuted at the New York Film Festival.[2] It went on to gross only $2.5 million domestically, well below its estimated $10 million budget.[3] Most mainstream reviewers reacted negatively to Coppola's film, criticizing its overt style and lack of characterization.[4] However, film critic David Thomson called it, "Coppola's best film, the most emotional, the most revolutionary and the most clearly in love with the 1940's movies."[5]

Contents

[edit] Cast

[edit] Production

Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay for Rumble Fish with S.E. Hinton on his days off from shooting The Outsiders. He made the films back-to-back, retaining much of the same cast and crew. As with The Outsiders, Coppola enlisted a large group of young, up-and-coming male actors - including now-famous performers such as Matt Dillon, Chris Penn, Nicolas Cage (actually, Coppola's nephew), Laurence Fishburne, Vincent Spano and Mickey Rourke. The material had an autobiographical element for the director as the relationship between Rusty-James and the Motorcycle Boy mirrored the one between Coppola and his brother, August.[6]

To get Rourke into the mindset of his character, Coppola gave him books written by Albert Camus and a biography of Napoleon.[7] The Motorcycle Boy's look was patterned after Camus complete with trademark cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth - taken from a photograph of the author that Rourke used as a visual handle.[8] Rourke remembers that he approached his character as "an actor who no longer finds his work interesting."[9]

Before filming started, Coppola ran regular screenings of old films during the evenings to familiarize the cast and in particular, the crew with his visual concept for Rumble Fish. Most notably, Coppola showed Anatole Litvak's Decision Before Dawn, the inspiration for the film's smoky look, and Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which became Rumble Fish's "stylistic prototype."[10] Coppola's extensive use of shadows (some were painted on alley walls for proper effect), oblique angles, exaggerated compositions, and an abundance of smoke and fog are all hallmarks of these German Expressionist films.[11] Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, shot mainly in time-lapse photography, motivated Coppola to use this technique to animate the sky in his own film.[12]

Warner Brothers was not happy with an early cut of The Outsiders and passed on distributing Rumble Fish.[13] Despite the lack of financing in place, Coppola completely recorded the film on video during two weeks of rehearsals in a former school gymnasium.[14]

Coppola hired Michael Smuin, a choreographer and co-director of the San Francisco Ballet, to stage the fight scene between Rusty-James and Biff Wilcox. He asked Smuin to include specific visual elements: a motorcycle, broken glass, knives, gushing water and blood.[15] The choreographer spent a week designing the sequence.

Six weeks into production, Coppola made a deal with Universal Pictures and principal photography began on July 12, 1982 on many of the same Tulsa, Oklahoma sets used in The Outsiders.[16]

The movie is notable for its avant-garde style, shot on stark high-contrast black-and-white film, using the spherical cinematographic process with allusions to French New Wave cinema. The striking black and white photography of the film's cinematographer, Stephen H. Burum, lies in two main sources: the films of Orson Welles and German cinema of the 1920s.[17] When the film was in its pre-production phase, Coppola asked Burum how he wanted to film it and they agreed that it might be the only chance they were ever going to have to make a black-and-white film.[18]

The result is an often surreal world where time seems to follow its own rules. The film, filled with retro anachronisms, seems to portray life in the mid-1950s when Rusty James' hoodlum gang mentality was beginning to give way to the bohemian Beatnik way of life represented by his brother.[19] However, other elements in the film indicate that the story in fact takes place in the present time: Rusty James plays a Pac-Man arcade game in a bar, and contemporary Zydeco musician Queen Ida is performing at an outdoor festival.

[edit] Soundtrack

Rumble Fish (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Rumble Fish (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) cover
Soundtrack by Stewart Copeland
Released April 21, 1992 (CD)
Recorded 1983
Genre Soundtrack
Length 43:08
Label A&M
Producer Stewart Copeland
Francis Ford Coppola
Professional reviews

Coppola envisioned a largely experimental score to complement his images. He began to devise a mainly percussive soundtrack to symbolize the idea of time running out. As Coppola worked on it, he realized that he needed help from a professional musician. He asked Stewart Copeland, drummer of the musical group The Police, to improvise a rhythm track. Coppola soon realized that Copeland was a far superior composer and let him take over. The musician proceeded to record street sounds of Tulsa and mixed them into the soundtrack with the use of a Musync, a new device at the time, that recorded film, frame by frame on videotape with the image on top, the dialogue in the middle, and the musical staves on the bottom so that it matched the images perfectly.[20]

The song "Don't Box Me In (theme from Rumble Fish)," a collaboration between Copeland and singer/songwriter Stan Ridgway, leader and frontman of Wall of Voodoo, was released with the film and enjoyed significant radio airplay.

[edit] Track listing

  1. "Don't Box Me In" 4:40
  2. "Tulsa Tango" 3:42
  3. "Our Mother Is Alive" 4:16
  4. "Party at Someone Else's Place" 2:25
  5. "Biff Gets Stomped by Rusty James" 2:27
  6. "Brothers on Wheels" 4:20
  7. "West Tulsa Story" 3:59
  8. "Tulsa Rags" 1:39
  9. "Father on the Stairs" 3:01
  10. "Hostile Bridge to Benny's" 1:53
  11. "Your Mother Is Not Crazy" 2:48
  12. "Personal Midget/Cain's Ballroom" 5:55
  13. "Motorboy's Fate" 2:03

[edit] Reception

At Rumble Fish's world premiere at the New York Film Festival, there were several walkouts and at the end of the screening, boos and catcalls.[21] Former head of production at Paramount Pictures remembers legendary producer Robert Evans' reaction to Coppola's film, "Evans went to see Rumble Fish, and he remembers being shaken by how far Coppola had strayed from Hollywood. Evans says, 'I was scared. I couldn't understand any of it.'"[22] The film grossed $18,985 on its opening weekend, playing in only one theater. Its widest release was in 296 theaters and it finally grossed $2,494,480 domestically.[23]

The film was not well-received by most mainstream critics upon its initial release, receiving nine negative reviews in New York City, mostly from broadcast media and newspapers with harsh reviews by David Denby in New York and Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice.[24] In her review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "But the film is so furiously overloaded, so crammed with extravagant touches, that any hint of a central thread is obscured."[25] Gary Arnold in the Washington Post wrote, "It's virtually impossible to be drawn into the characters' identities and conflicts at even an introductory, rudimentary level, and the rackety distraction of an obtrusive experimental score...frequently makes it impossible to comprehend mere dialogue."[26]

Jay Scott wrote one of the few positive reviews for the film in the Globe and Mail. "Francis Coppola, bless his theatrical soul, may have the commercial sense of a newt, but he has the heart of a revolutionary, and the talent of a great artist."[27] Jack Kroll also gave a rare rave in his review for Newsweek: "Rumble Fish is a brilliant tone poem...Rourke's Motorcycle Boy is really a young god with a mortal wound, a slippery assignment Rourke handles with a fierce delicacy."[28]

[edit] DVD

The film was first released on September 9, 1998 with no extra material. A special edition was released on September 13, 2005 with an audio commentary by Coppola, six deleted scenes, a making-of featurette, a look at how Copeland's score was created and the "Don't Box Me In" music video.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Goodwin ?.
  2. ^ Chown 167.
  3. ^ Box Office Mojo.
  4. ^ Chown 167.
  5. ^ Chown 170.
  6. ^ Cowie 170; Goodwin 350; Chown 169.
  7. ^ Cowie 173.
  8. ^ Goodwin 350.
  9. ^ Goodwin ?.
  10. ^ Goodwin 349.
  11. ^ Goodwin ?.
  12. ^ Goodwin 349; Chown 170.
  13. ^ Goodwin ?.
  14. ^ Scott, "Rumble Fish: Another from the Heart," E1; Goodwin ?.
  15. ^ Goodwin ?.
  16. ^ Goodwin ?.
  17. ^ Cowie 171.
  18. ^ Fisher.
  19. ^ Chown ?.
  20. ^ Goodwin ?.
  21. ^ Scott, "Loving, Ferocious Depiction of Teen Angst," E7.
  22. ^ Chown 168.
  23. ^ Box Office Mojo.
  24. ^ Chown 167.
  25. ^ Maslin C10.
  26. ^ Arnold D3.
  27. ^ Scott, "Loving, Ferocious Depiction of Teen Angst," E7.
  28. ^ Kroll 128.

[edit] References

  • Arnold, Gary. "Bungled Rumble." Washington Post 18 Oct. 1983: D3.
  • Chown, Jeffrey. Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola. New York: Praeger, 1988.
  • Cowie, Peter. Coppola. Suffolk: St. Edmundsbury, 1989.
  • A Conversation With Stephen Burum, ASC. International Cinematographers Guild.
  • Goodwin, Michael, and Naomi Wise. On the Edge: The Life and Times of Francis Coppola. New York: Morrow, 1989.
  • Kroll, Jack. "Coppola's Teen-Age Inferno." Newsweek 7 Nov. 1983: 128.
  • Maslin, Janet. "Matt Dillon is Coppola's Rumble Fish." New York Times 7 Oct. 1983: C10.
  • Rumble Fish. Box Office Mojo. 23 May 2007.
  • Scott, Jay. "Rumble Fish: Another from the Heart." Globe and Mail 10 Sep. 1982: E1.
  • ———. "Loving, Ferocious Depiction of Teen Angst." Globe and Mail 14 Oct. 1983: E7.

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Francis Ford Coppola
1960s
Nebo Zovyet (as a film-school student, US adaptation and dubbing only) · The Bellboy and the Playgirls (with Fritz Umgelter and Jack Hill) · Tonight for Sure · Dementia 13 · You're a Big Boy Now (1966) · Finian's Rainbow · The Rain People
1970s
The Godfather (1972) · The Conversation (1974) · The Godfather Part II (1974) · Apocalypse Now (1979)
1980s
One from the Heart (1982) · The Outsiders (1983) · Rumble Fish (1983) · The Cotton Club (1984) · Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) · Gardens of Stone (1987) · Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) · New York Stories (with Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese) (1989) · Captain EO
1990s
The Godfather Part III (1990) · Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) · Jack (1996) · The Rainmaker (1997)
2000s
Productions