The Right Stuff (Two-Disc Special Edition) | Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn

The Right Stuff (Two-Disc Special Edition) | Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn | A Great Story and Movie

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The Right Stuff (T...

	The Right Stuff (Two-Disc Special Edition) Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn Warner Home Video, 2003 average customer review:based on 140 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In the middle of the 20th century America pondered its future - and looked to the skies. Based on Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff is the tale of how that future began a thrilling epic of intrepid test pilot Chuck Yeager and the seven pioneering astronauts of the Project Mercury space program. Philip Kaufman scripts and directs pushing the envelope with a filmmaking bravado that matches this soaring story of training and heroism; and of sudden fame for which there is no training. Ed Harris Barbara Hershey Sam Shepard Dennis Quaid and Fred Ward are among the perfect cast of this winner of 4 Academy Awards* that in a pristine 20th-anniversary digital transfer remains the stuff of must-see entertainment. Let's light this candle flyboys!Running Time: 193 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 085392449927

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"Oh Lord, what a heavenly light!"

"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, 750 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.

"Then they built a small plane, the X-1, to try and break the Sound Barrier, and men came to the high desert of California to ride it. They were called test pilots, and no-one knew their names."

With its communal desert funerals and men riding out of the night to exchange their horses for jets, The Right Stuff's extraordinary opening places it firmly as a mythic modern western. With the West conquered and the demon in the air tamed, the new frontier is Space and the new pioneers America's first astronauts, the 'Magnificent' Mercury Seven.

Picked as much for their looks as their abilities - Chuck Yeager, the legendary test pilot who broke the Sound Barrier, was rejected for the programme because he didn't go to college while John Glenn was chosen because he was good on a game show - the film strips away the NASA-LIFE magazine marketing image of all-American boy-next-door heroes for one of flawed human beings overcoming the everyday to achieve extraordinary things. Real heroes rather than manufactured ones.

Yet if those around them are clowns - the neurotic double-act of recruiters Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer, Donald Moffat's Lyndon B. Johnson throwing a paddy in his car, the ex-Nazi rocket scientists singing old battle songs on lift-off - the astronauts are heroic but convincingly human figures. Surprisingly, the film also finds a lot of time for their wives, whose growing dependence on each other mirrors their husbands' camaraderie. Both male and female ensembles are excellent, but special mention must be made of Fred Ward as the ill-starred Gus Grissom and Ed Harris' upright, difficult to like Glenn.

This basis in recognisable reality adds immensely to the film's impact, although one of Kaufman's most successful notions is also his most daringly stylised: making Death a flesh-and-blood character in the film, personified by Royal Dano's black-clad minister who silently strides up to test pilot's doors to break the bad news to their widows. Even when the space program begins he can be found in the crowd, a constant spectre reminding the audience of the enormity of the odds against the first astronauts. Despite the cynicism the film has for authority - "Our German scientists are better than their German scientists" - it never forgets there's something real at stake.

More than anything else, it is full of honest wonder, where the truly special effects are the emotional ones, the film at times genuinely moving. Glenn's orbit of the Earth to the accompaniment of Henry Mancini's score from Kaufman's earlier The White Dawn is one of the screen's most magical moments, and the film's final line of dialogue carries real weight coming from the film's most flippant character. Nor does Kaufman forget the men who were left behind because they didn't fit the profile, Sam Shepherd's Yeager finally getting to touch the very heavens in the film's climax, the demon finally tamed and replaced with a heavenly light as the end of the great heroic era of solo test pilots - and the Mercury Seven were just that - comes to an end.

With much humour and some striking, unforgettable images - Royal Dano's Angel of Death glimpsed as another test pilot sets off, the sparks from an Aborigine fire seeming to summon up fireflies in space, the suited astronauts striding towards the camera in a shot that's been imitated a thousand times since, Yeager emerging from the desert haze after a plane crash - The Right Stuff is one of the great films of the eighties, and just gets better every time you see it.

Part of the last batch of epics aimed at a primarily adult audience - Reds, Ragtime, The Bounty among them - and boasting a then-massive $27m budget, this was the last big roll of the dice for the Ladd Company, which had been started with high hopes but had been badly hit by the failure of films like Blade Runner (their only significant hit was the first Police Academy. The film's box-office failure would herald the end of the startup, but not before they were reluctantly forced to infamously heavily cut Once Upon a Time in America in the US after disastrous Cannes reviews because of theatres reluctance to book another long film after The Right Stuff. Perhaps it's that lack of success that meant that the film was only available in a standard `vanilla' edition before this special edition, but the two-disc set makes amends with some good extras. The featurettes on the making of the film could be longer and it's a shame that the audio commentaries are only scene-specific rather than covering the whole film, but there are some interesting deleted scenes that were wisely omitted. The cuts show that Kaufman at one point intended to take the comedy in a more crudely comic mode, with NASA's chief scientist and Lyndon B. Johnson's cackling crosscut with cackling chimps, and even the film's stirring shot of the suited astronauts striding towards the camera undermined by the comic capers of the press corps.

The real Mercury Seven are also acknowledged in the set with archive footage, new interviews and a documentary on John Glenn as well as the theatrical trailer. All in all an impressive two-disc set for a great movie.

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A Great Story and Movie

I was at Edwards AFB when they filmed this movie in 1982. Two years before, as a young lieutenant I arrived there to become quickly immersed in the lore of the place: Pancho Barnes, Rogers dry lake, leiman ridge, the rocket tests, the flight test center, and, who else, Chuck Yeager. I met the man himself once after Hal Needham, and Stan Barrett broke the sound barrier with their rocket car. Yeager helped them get support for their project.

This movie is great entertainment but was hurt at the time because the cold war was still going on. PBS's Nova series recently provided some clues as to why Tom Wolf described test pilots as those who "nobody knew their names." It seems that the Air Force had a parallel project to NASA's moon shot. Of course, Tom Wolf couldn't talk about it. When I was an Air Force officer there were rumors. My test area was the rocket site not the flight test center so I was far and away from the truth or the rumor. The Air Force program, according to Nova, was to put a space station in orbit to replace the U-2 because the airplane was vulnerable to Soviet missiles.

All in all, the Right Stuff is a tribute to those in both programs. It captures the flavor of the time with flare and charm that is sometimes missing in Wolf's book. I especially like the musical score. This is an excellent movie well worth the 193 minutes it will take to savor it.

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Yay Astronauts!

We love anything pertaining to Space Travel. We are true fans of this movie. It is entertaining and features some of the people we have seen in many other Astronaut movies. Truly worth it!

The Right Stuff

How much do you really know about the beginnings of the space program and how it all came about? This movie sets the scene and gives an insight into the brave men who took the Western World into the space age. Chuck Jaeger, the first man to break the sound barrier and survive, makes a cameo appearance while all actors put a human face to those brave Mercury Pilots who not only risked all but gave us the names of the sons in Thunderbirds. Great performances by each of the stars and well worth a look.

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A Good but Somewhat Disjointed History of the Mercury 7 Astronauts

Much of this movie shows events prior to the first manned American space flight, and I focus my review only on that latter part. Some of the transitions between scenes are abrupt, and the viewer who is unfamiliar with Mercury-flight history may at times have difficulty following what is going on.

The movie captures Alan Shepard's famous comment: "Why don't you solve your little problems and light this candle!", the sinking of the Liberty Bell 7, John Glenn and the heat-shield problem, Gordo Cooper and his joyful 22-orbit flight. It also reflects the sting of Soviet successes, which, at that time, had always predated American ones.

There is a scene from the Muchea (Sp?) Tracking Station in Western Australia. Gordo Cooper is sent there to communicate with Glenn as he passes overhead. Nearby aborigines build a big fire. Glenn reports seeing the lights of Perth. Then comes the sunrise over the Pacific and those "fireflies".

This movie includes clips of the actual events (e. g., President JFK pinning an award on the chest of Alan Shepard; Gus Grissom being lifted out of the water by a helicopter, etc.) cleverly interspersed with actors playing the roles. There is an actor who plays the venerable Walter Cronkite in reporting on the flights. Finally, there are scenes depicting the astronauts' personal lives. For instance, John Glenn supports his wife when she doesn't want TV reporters intruding upon her life.

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