Rumble Fish (1983) - Episode 112

The Rewind Movie Podcast

“What's this? Another glorious battle for the kingdom?” We’re heading to the stifling summer heat of Tulsa, Oklahoma for Francis Ford Coppola’s lyrical, monochromatic 1983 teen dream Rumble Fish.

In the absence of his living-legend older brother, known only as The Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke), hot-headed would-be gang leader Rusty James (Matt Dillon) is called out for a fight that he is only too ready to agree to, much to the concern of his straitlaced girlfriend Patty (Diane Lane). But when the Motorcycle Boy dramatically returns, seemingly from a trip to California, his inscrutable behaviour and mysterious half-smile unsettle those around him - all except Rusty, who follows him everywhere, desperate to return to the simple, yet violent, gang days that he longingly recalls. But for The Motorcycle Boy, time has run out on those days, and, perhaps, is running out entirely…

Following a brutal few years of financial disappointment and overblown, physically and psychologically draining projects, Coppola shot Rumble Fish back-to-back with another adaptation of a novel by the same author, S.E. Hinton, so enjoying the opportunity to work on a manageable scale and in a spirit of unfettered collaboration and creativity in isolation from the Hollywood machine. Seeking to infuse a youth-oriented product with genuine philosophical and artistic depth, he mined his own childhood idolisation of his older sibling, while retaining the source novel’s flights of mythical high-mindedness and narrative idiosyncrasies. Film-picker Devlin recalls his long-standing love of this oft-overlooked entry into Coppola’s post-Apocalypse Now filmography, as first-time-viewers Patrick and Gali, and fellow fan Matt, dive into this lush, idiosyncratic, angular feature.

You can find an exclusive poster design created by Devlin for this feature as a gallery-grade giclee print at his Etsy store, and a standard poster and t-shirts featuring the same design at our Teemill - along with another poster of this episode’s cover sketch.

Get in touch with us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and if you'd like to submit a request, correct our constant mispronunciations, or have a chat about whatever is on your mind, you can email [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

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