Godfather (45 page)

What's more, Tavoularis's seedy sets encompassed thick coats of dust,
peeling paint, cracks in the walls, and creaking stairways in the slum dwellings where the gang members live. As the camera explores the cramped living quarters Rusty-James shares with his father and brother, the viewer gets a sense of the confinement the boys who live there must endure.

During filming Hinton was herself impressed with her ability to rewrite material under the gun. “Working with Francis,” she recalls, “I could never tell when he was going to turn to me and say, ‘Susie, we'll need a new scene here to make this play.' I could have it for him in three minutes, and it was pretty good, too.”
³⁰
This sort of emergency writing on the set yielded some memorable bits of dialogue. Some of the nifty lines one hears spoken from the screen are not in the final shooting script and, therefore, must have been supplied by Hinton on the set, perhaps with the help of the cast during improvisations. For example, Motorcycle Boy expresses his fatherly concern for his troubled younger brother in terms that remind one of Darrel dealing with his surrogate son Ponyboy in
The Outsiders
. (As a matter of fact, Motorcycle Boy has one confab with Rusty-James in the same Rexall drugstore in Tulsa that Dallas robbed in
The Outsiders
. Coppola thereby makes a subtle cross-reference from one film to the other.)

In one conversation Motorcycle Boy asks Rusty-James why he is so messed up, and Rusty-James replies laconically, “I'm alright.” But big brother is not to be put off with a dodge. “Talk to me,” he insists. “Why are you fucked up all the time one way or another, huh?” Rusty-James can only grunt, “I don't know,” in reply. Motorcycle Boy's crude language belies the genuine caring he nurtures for the welfare of Rusty-James, for whom he subconsciously feels something of a father-figure. In short, Motorcycle Boy does not want his brother to follow him down the road to ruin.

During shooting Dennis Hopper saw the advantage of Coppola replaying each scene on the TV monitor in the Silverfish in order to make modifications in each scene as it was filmed and to make notes to pass on to editor Barry Malkin. “Francis's genius is really in his technology,” says Hopper.
³¹

The filming of
Rumble Fish
went off as efficiently as the shooting of
The Outsiders
, and production finished in October. Once more Coppola was on schedule and on budget. The endless shooting schedules and exorbitant budgets of
Apocalypse Now
and
One from the Heart
seemed at this point to belong to the distant past.

Coppola collaborated closely with Barry Malkin on the edit of the movie. Malkin particularly enjoyed cutting together the rumble scene that occurs near the beginning of the movie when Rusty-James takes on the leader of an opposing gang. The fight comprised eighty-one shots in two
minutes of screen time. “It's generally easier to cut… a flashy, razzle-dazzle action sequence,” explains Malkin, “than it is to edit a dialogue sequence with a lot of characters sitting around a table,” which can seem quite static and boring to the viewer.
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After postproduction was completed, the premiere of
Rumble Fish
was delayed until the fall of 1983 so that the release of
Rumble Fish
did not follow too closely on the first-run showings of
The Outsiders
, which came out in the spring of 1983. Since
Rumble Fish
was thought to be an art film, it was considered too sophisticated to attract the same wide, youth audience that saw
The Outsiders
. So Coppola decided to premiere the movie at the New York Film Festival on October 7, 1983, in order to bring it to the attention of a more mature audience. The critics who saw the picture at the Festival screening, however, were by and large unresponsive to the movie, just as the reviewers had been to
One from the Heart
when it premiered at Radio City Music Hall. Coppola tells me that the snobbish New York critics had been lining up against him since
Godfather II
. “They won't even throw me a bone,” he laments.

Rumble Fish
begins with clouds hurtling across a darkening sky (by means of Burum's speeded-up photography). The swiftly moving clouds, coupled with the frequent images of clocks—including one huge clock without hands—are meant to express a feeling of urgency, of the unstoppable passage of time—a fact of life Coppola says young people find hard to grasp. He particularly wished to heighten the effect of time running out for the disenchanted and self-destructive Motorcycle Boy, whose hour of doom may be approaching.

There is a sign spray-painted on a brick wall, “The Motorcycle Boy Reigns.” It reminds Rusty-James how much he misses his older brother, Motorcycle Boy, who had been the leader of the street gang Rusty-James belongs to until he left town a couple of months earlier. Rusty-James is challenged to fight with Biff Wilcox, the leader of another gang. Members of both gangs show up for the rumble. The fight takes place near a freight yard in a steaming, wet alley, which almost makes the summer heat palpable.

“It is a dance of violence”—designed by choreographer Michael Smuin of the San Francisco Ballet—in which “the gangs form a male corps de ballet,” with the movements of the fighters “lit by flashes from the windows of a passing train.”
³³
The balletic movements of the youths recall the staging of the rumble in the musical
West Side Story
(1961). During the slugfest, Biff, who is high on drugs, pulls a knife on his opponent. Rusty-James, in turn, swings from a waterpipe to avoid being cut, and the waterpipe bursts. Then he hurls Biff through the window of a deserted building.

Suddenly Motorcycle Boy appears out of nowhere, astride his bike. Rusty-James is momentarily distracted by his brother's unexpected appearance, and Biff slashes Rusty-James with a jagged piece of glass from the broken window. The blood gushing from Rusty-James's wound has been prefigured by the water rushing from the waterpipe. Motorcycle Boy retaliates by unleashing his riderless bike at full throttle on Biff, who is totally flattened by it. The image of Motorcycle Boy astride his cycle, which recurs in the film, evokes Marlon Brando as the biker in
The Wild One
(1954). Motorcycle Boy is likewise a bored and aimless nonconformist, “the quintessential teen anti-hero,” determined to beat the system or die trying.
³⁴

On the way back to the tenement the boys inhabit with their father, Motorcycle Boy tells Rusty-James that during his sojourn in California he located their mother, who had deserted them in childhood. She is living in Los Angeles with a movie producer. Their father is glad to see the return of the prodigal son. The squalor in which the family lives is reflected in the messy tenement flat, while the empty booze bottles in the dirty sink symbolize the disorder of their dad's life, especially the manner in which he neglects his sons. Coppola sometimes photographs the father, who lives in an alcoholic haze, from a tilted angle, indicating that he is unsteady, off-balance.

Because he is color-blind, Motorcycle Boy says that he perceives the universe as if he were watching a black-and-white television set. He cannot “see what is over the rainbow.” Significantly, the only color in his world he can see is that of the crimson rumble fish, which he shows to Rusty-Jones in a pet shop. In order to convey that Motorcycle Boy is color-blind, Coppola felt that Motorcycle Boy should occasionally see color for a few seconds, and then the color would disappear. Then it occurred to Coppola that “only the fish themselves—which serve as a metaphor for the story—would be in color.”
³⁵

Motorcycle Boy calls the Siamese fighting fish “rumble fish” because they possess a fighting instinct that drives them to attack each other. Indeed, Motorcycle Boy says that if one holds a mirror up to the glass of the fish tank the rumble fish will even attack their own reflection. Motorcycle Boy senses a kinship between these hostile creatures and the rival gangs, who have rumbles to fight with each other.

In essence, Motorcycle Boy himself represents the young urban toughs who inhabit the crooked streets and shadowy alleys of their sleazy world, for he is at odds with society and refuses to conform to its norms. He is revered by his youthful peers for his stubborn attitude, which is antiestablishment and antiauthority. Motorcycle Boy's basic flaw, says Coppola, “is
his inability to compromise, and that's why I made him color-blind. He interprets life in black-and-white.”
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Rusty-James, an inarticulate, confused young man, is discouraged because the other gang members, who unabashedly admire his brother, constantly remind him that he is no match for Motorcycle Boy. “He's like royalty in exile,” one of them opines. But Motorcycle Boy no longer has any such delusions of grandeur about himself. It is a bit of a burden to be Robin Hood, Jesse James, and the Pied Piper, he confesses to Rusty-James. He sees himself as little more than “the Neighborhood novelty.”

Motorcycle Boy comes across a tattered photograph of the two brothers in childhood in which he holds his baby brother in a protective embrace. “You follow me around like a lost puppy,” he later says to Rusty-James as they watch the rumble fish in the pet shop. “I wish I had been the big brother you always wanted.” He has the nagging feeling that he has let his younger brother down, both as a role model and as a gang leader. “If you're gonna lead people, you've gotta have somewhere to go,” he reflects. He implicitly realizes that he is a lost cause. Coppola pictures Motorcycle Boy as a kind of rat who cannot find his way out of a maze. Furthermore, more than once the brothers are photographed through a fence or the metal bars of a fire escape, suggesting that they are imprisoned together in a cruel and indifferent world and must stick together for survival.

One night Motorcycle Boy takes Rusty along with him as he breaks into the pet shop. He opens all the cages and releases the animals. This scene recalls Killer Kilgannon's similar action in
The Rain People
, which Hinton says she saw before she wrote
Rumble Fish
(see
chapter 3
). Motorcycle Boy then grabs the fishbowl containing the rumble fish, his “aquatic brothers,” and tells Rusty-James that he intends to set them free in the nearby river. “They really belong in the river,” he tells Rusty-James; “I don't think they'd rumble if they were in the river.”

When the police arrive, Officer Patterson (William Smith), who has been convinced all along that Motorcycle Boy is a menace to society, goes after Motorcycle Boy. Patterson functions as the Angel of Death in the movie, for he has metaphorically hovered above Motorcycle Boy's head, waiting for him to step out of line. He seizes the opportunity afforded by the pet shop break-in to shoot Motorcycle Boy dead. The lad had hoped to escape the corrosive atmosphere of the big city by flight to a more wholesome environment, but for Motorcycle Boy, brutalized by life on the street, it is already too late. He is gunned down at the climax of
Rumble Fish
, just as Dallas was shot in cold blood in
The Outsiders
, in both instances by trigger-happy cops. Society has no place for rebellious loners like Dallas and Motorcycle Boy.

Patterson throws Rusty-James up against a police car and frisks him, and Rusty-James sees his own reflection in the car window in color—the only color image in the film besides that of the rumble fish. He smashes the window in anguish and frustration. His action of hitting his own reflection parallels a rumble fish attacking its own reflection in a mirror held up to the fish tank. Since the rumble fish are a symbol of “self-destructive teenagers trapped in urban poverty,” they represent Rusty-James's determination to escape the narrow existence in which he feels entrapped.
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Coppola, who had used long takes extensively in
One from the Heart
, employs some extended takes impressively in this movie. At this point, for example, the camera tracks slowly from Motorcycle Boy's corpse, past the curious onlookers to Steve, Rusty-James's loyal friend who shares his grief. Then it passes on to the brothers' fuddled father, who turns away from his son's dead body, downs a swig of whiskey, and stumbles away from the tragic scene. This panning shot is much more effective than a series of quick cuts to various bystanders would have been, since the solemn, slow pan underlines the funereal sadness of the occasion.

The shooting script ends much differently than the film. The last scene as described in the shooting script concludes with Motorcycle Boy lying dead on the ground, “with the rumble fish flapping and dying around him, still too far from the river,… as the police car drives off with Rusty-James.”
³⁸
In the movie as released, Rusty James silently carries the fishbowl to the nearby river bank, then he fulfills his brother's last wish by throwing the rumble fish into the river. Remembering his deceased brother's advice that he should get out of town and follow the river clear to the sea, Rusty-James mounts his brother's motorcycle and roars off into the night.

There follows a brief epilogue that is also not in the shooting script and, therefore, like the wordless actions of Rusty James just described, must have been invented by Coppola during filming, since Hinton attests that it was he who contributed the visual imagery to the film. The movie concludes with Rusty-James in silhouette, astride the cycle on a California beach, silently watching the seagulls flit over the Pacific Ocean. He has indeed reached the sea. Moreover, he is now liberated from his hero worship of his brother and is no longer living under Motorcycle Boy's shadow. He is now prepared to get a fresh start in life—alone.

Coppola thought that throughout the film the underappreciated younger brother was certainly the more promising of the pair. In the end, says Coppola, Rusty-James has ceased to worship his brother as a false idol and grasped the fact that it is he who has survived, not his older brother. He has realized that “he, not his brother, is the one who is blessed.”
³⁹
Clearly,
Coppola's altered ending to the film gives it a more positive conclusion than the one in the screenplay, which concludes with Rusty-James being arrested and the rumble fish floundering on the ground.