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Volume 27, Issue 7, September 23, 2004

Opinion

Nearsighted Reviews: The Right Stuff

photo illustration by Ian Neligh

Ian Neligh

"The Right Stuff" is more American than gasoline, barbecue, and a battered Stetson sitting on a rusted Ford ... in Monument Valley ... at sunset. This classic piece of Americana is served up in a nice slice of 193-minute apple pie from director Philip Kaufman and writer Tom Wolfe.

This blue-jeans-buzz-cut approach to the American space program is filled with the stuff legends are made of and best of all-it's a true story. Chuck Yeager and Alan Shepard come walking tall across the beautifully filmed landscape of the cold war like the Greek heroes of antiquity marching off to Troy.

From the introduction of the US Mercury 7 astronauts to the final hair-raising flight of the movie, it's clear that the receipt for the space race came from reckless bravery to dive blindly into the unknown, coupled with good old-fashioned machismo. Kaufman learns to blend adrenaline and humor with a story that unfolds like an epic.

This was really the first time in a movie we saw the slow side-by-side march into the camera and more metaphorically into the future.

"The Right Stuff" begins and we see clips of black and white; this intro gives me goose bumps every time I see it. A narrator with a strong Texas accent starts talking over old test-flight clips, some real, others created for the movie:

"There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the sound barrier."

With this, the film shoots off like a rocket. It was recently screened at Starz, but any excuse to see this movie, even on television, is a great reason to go and check it out, especially if you've never seen it before.

This is one of the greats.

Adam Goldstein

The first frames of the 1983 epic "The Right Stuff" are grainy, black and white 50s flight footage. The cameras are silent witnesses to sleek jets speeding through the air, and a voice-over explains that the pilots manning these missions are more than simple aviators; they are on a quest to break the sound barrier, restless hunters forever chasing the "demon that lives in the thin air." A plane veers, spins, plummets, and crashes to the ground. Vibrant color explodes from the flames onto the screen as the sprawling space drama takes off.

Philip Kaufman's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's novel documents the infancy of the American space program and its star players, from Chuck Yeager's early forays past the speed of sound as a test pilot to Leroy Gordon "Gordo" Cooper's 22-orbit outer space odyssey of 1963. Yet, the film is much more than a simple space movie; it is a timeless human drama. Indeed, the film serves more to catalogue the conflicts, joys, and pains of the pilots and their families as they fearlessly leap into the unknown, as they "push the envelope a little bit more." The characters operate more in an atmosphere of collective Cold War fear than in the reaches of space, a very terrestrial ambience where every technological innovation is a race against the Russians. Kaufman pays careful attention to the woes and worries of the pilots' wives, who live in a constant fear that their husbands won't come home. Dennis Quaid, Fred Ward, Sam Shepard, and the rest of the cast skillfully blend tough-guy bravado with human pathos and Bill Conti's Oscar- winning score incorporates Holst's "The Planets" and Debussy's "Au Clair de la Lune."

20 years after its initial release, the film suffers at times from dated techniques and dramatic overkill. Still, "The Right Stuff" remains a tasteful and fundamentally human look at the technology that changed our understanding of the cosmos. For all its specific historical contexts and situations, the film stands as an enduring tribute to human fearlessness and the thrill of discovery.