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| Images courtesy of Warner Brothers |
Writer-director Philip Kaufman’s 1983 film adaptation of Tom
Wolfe’s 1979 nonfiction book The Right Stuff chronicling the saga of the
American space race is a monumental chunk of unexpurgated director-driven New
Hollywood Cinema peaking around the time when the tide for such movies broke
with Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (also a sprawling epic rife with
historical significance and spectacle).
Spanning three decades over the course of three hours from Chuck
Yeager’s (Sam Shepard) breaking of the sound barrier to the beginning of the
Space Race against the Soviets leading to the space launches of several key
astronauts including Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) and
John Glenn (Ed Harris), it is a comprehensive trained uncompromising study of
the hardships endured by several American pilots who can be characterized as
national heroes. With all of the good
and bad, right and wrong on display including some medical testing scenes during
the selection process of potential candidates that are still hard to watch now,
the saga of The Right Stuff might be the most distinctly American
historical dramatization of the Space Race ever attempted with only pale
imitations including a recently cancelled Disney+ series appearing since.
Narrated omnisciently by Air Force test pilot Jack Ridley
(Levon Holm), the expanse of The Right Stuff begins with a preamble in
postwar 1947 following numerous failed fatal test piloting accidents at the
Muroc Army Airfield in California while flying the rocket powered Bell
X-1. Wartime hero and Captain Chuck
Yeager (Sam Shepard) leaps at the chance to pilot the X-1 and following a
nerve-wracking test flight Yeager successfully breaks the ‘demon in the
sky’. Initially a secret before the
military becomes further involved in forming what will or won’t become the
group of men with The Right Stuff, Yeager in reality declined
participation in the program but the film version finds his own speed records being
superseded by younger less qualified as well as prime piloting material
recruits in training. Then the Soviets
launched the Sputnik satellite thus triggering the Space Race which excludes
Yeager due to his lack of a college degree.
Eventually the Mercury Seven astronauts comprised of both marine and
navy corps undergo a strenuous and difficult series of medical, physiological
and psychological tests including being locked in a dark room with a ticking
clock that hours later turns noisy and frightening. Following Yuri Gagarin’s Soviet space flight
on the Vostok 1, the determination of the seven astronauts with The Right
Stuff becomes more immediate than ever in their unified goal to meet if not
surpass their match.
Jaw dropping and awesomely uncompromising in scope and
real-world endurances, The Right Stuff from Rocky and Raging Bull producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff is a mammoth powerhouse of
the tail end of 1970s director driven filmmaking on the scale of Michael Cimino,
Francis Ford Coppola or William Friedkin.
Though Philip Kaufman previously dabbled in science-fiction fantasy with
his 1978 adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as well as penning
the story with George Lucas for Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Right
Stuff finds Kaufman wading in nuts-and-bolts hard boiled scientific fact
and strips away the clean veneer of the Space Program’s image versus what transpired
behind closed doors. With medical
examinations that range from Friedkin levels of harrowing to silly and
hilarious without ever losing the sense of realism mixed in with the small-town
American drive to transcend humankind’s own limited physical form, the film
gives us the ugly truth like it or not however painful the endurances are to
look upon.
In addition to being a mixture of urgent, frightening and
thrilling historical biographical storytelling, The Right Stuff also
leaves ample room for humor to sort of nurse the audience through some rather
difficult scenes like the training processes doled out upon (or against?) the
trainees. Our first brush with Alan
Shepard having electricity running through his hand in a lab test by a doctor
in a white overcoat is cringe inducingly tense and hard to watch while one of
our last medical tests involving a bladder balloon are close to achieving
outright comedy. There’s a medical test
involving a stoic female doctor demanding a semen culture that starts out
awkward but is played as an extended comic joke again detailing the lengths
with which doctors would go to determine an astronaut-in-training’s
limits. Alan Shepard again gets a funny
aside where he is on the launch pad and has to urinate but is told not to by
nervous scientists, juxtaposed with people drinking and/or spilling coffee and
Shepard’s increasingly strained reactions of holding his pee under duress. One of the hardest PG rated films of the
1980s including Gus Grissom dropping the F-bomb a couple of times in key
exclamations, make no mistake while about the space program and the astronauts,
this is far from being a squeaky-clean family friendly endeavor despite some of
the humor intended to soften the still sharp edges.
Structurally speaking, while an ensemble piece shifting
between several characters who have the proverbial The Right Stuff, the
film ends up bookending with Chuck Yeager, played excellently with a measure of
subtlety by Sam Shepard in a career best since Days of Heaven. Given Yeager’s own role in launching the
space program by breaking the sound barrier while being kept from the official Right
Stuff lineup of astronauts, the film circles back to his own journey in
challenging the limits of the space program as well himself. Though the program launches without him, he
nevertheless breaks another unforeseen record with the highest altitude to the
edge of space the then-new Lockheed NF-104A and nearly loses his life in the
process of reestablishing himself not just in the hearts and minds of the USAF,
but in the audience’s connection to Yeager’s drive and spirit at the end of a
three-hour saga. In a film filled with
many disparate characters and their own paths to success or upheaval depending,
it all returns to Yeager’s drive and spirit to push humankind’s technological
capabilities and wherewithal past its limit.
While many point to Forrest Gump as a prime example
of seamlessly interspersing newly shot scenes with preexisting footage
involving the film’s hero interacting with important historical figures, 1983
was the year of both Woody Allen’s Zelig as well as The Right Stuff
who inarguably beat Gump to the finish line by a decade. Take for instance a mid-film montage of the
astronauts observing failed rocket tests, using real footage captured of the
explosions on the launch pad or midflight detonations with newly shot snippets
plugged in with roughly the same finish.
Reminiscent of the melding of WWII footage with newly shot material ala
Stuart Cooper’s Overlord, the film achieves a docudrama mixture
that’s undetectable. With Being There
and The Natural cinematographer Caleb Deschanel’s understated and
softly lit vistas lending a gritty grainy seriousness to the footage with an
almost documentary-like quality, the patina of The Right Stuff ranges
wildly from loudly vast to quietly insular.
Effects shots remain breathtaking and ambitious for their time including
realistic miniature interpretations of space capsules orbiting the Earth upon
the ferocious power of reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Bill Conti’s score, maybe the most singularly
American piece of compositional work since the musician’s own Rocky soundtrack,
is much like the unfolding of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra. Evocative, grandiose, terrifying but also
triumphant in the struggle of exploration, Conti’s score ranges from thrilling
and uplifting to downbeat and haunted.
Of course the film wouldn’t be able to portray the titular The
Right Stuff properly were it not for the murderer’s row of an ensemble
cast. Starting with Sam Shepard as the
all-American hero Chuck Yeager who ignites a run sadly (for the film’s sake)
he’s not qualified to take part in, rounding out the cast of astronauts are
Scott Glenn as Alan Shepard, Ed Harris as John Glenn, Dennis Quaid as Gordon
Cooper, Fred Ward as Gus Grissom, Scott Paulin as Deke Slayton and Lance
Henriksen as Wally Schirra. Alongside
them are their wives who go through all of the upheaval and turmoil with their
husbands in person and when they’re away in orbit, played by Barbara Hershey as
Glennis Yeager, Kim Stanley as Pancho Barnes, Veronica Cartwright fresh off of
her prior Philip Kaufman stint in Invasion of the Body Snatchers as
Betty Grissom and Mary Jo Deschanel as Annie Glenn. Among the supporting cast members are The Thing and Popeye actor Donald Moffat as Lyndon B. Johnson, a
then-unknown Jeff Goldblum as a nameless recruiter tasked with finding
potential astronauts, The Thing actor David Clennon and at one point the
real Chuck Yeager shows up in it.
Everyone gives 110% in this ensemble odyssey from the breaking of the
sound barrier up through the numerous Earth orbiting missions and the
respective episodes of pain, anguish but also triumph and success are portrayed
with realism, abrasiveness but above all the American drive for conquering the
impossible.
Premiering in October of 1983 at the Kennedy Center in
Washington D.C. as part of a benefit to the American Film Institute, the film
was given a limited run a few days later where it tragically grossed a meager
$1.6 million on 229 screens. Up against
such box office titans as Return of the Jedi and Scarface, the
following February of 1984 after effusive critical praise including Roger
Ebert’s proclamation of ‘the best film of 1983’, Warner Brothers expanded the
release to nationwide where it continued to flounder only garner a further $1.6
million in ticket sales. Ultimately only
grossing $21 million against a $27 million budget, the project led to the Chariots
of Fire and Blade Runner production outfit The Ladd Company to fold
and cease operations with Warner Brothers.
While eventually the company recovered in a new deal with Paramount
Pictures including films like The Brady Bunch Movie and Braveheart,
the expansive three-hour odyssey through the heart of the American spirit into
the Space Race remained overlooked by the general public. Nevertheless, that didn’t prevent the film
from becoming an Awards favorite, securing eight Oscar nominations including
Best Picture and winning four for Best Editing, Score, Sound and Sound Effects
Editing. Circa 2013, the film was
selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of
Congress and was later ranked at number 19 on the AFI’s most inspiring movies
list.
In 2013, the film finally saw a digitally restored Blu-ray
release from Warner Brothers presented in proper 1.85:1 widescreen with
restored 5.1 surround sound presumably taken from one of the many 70mm release
prints. Included with the release were
selected scenes with cast and filmmaker commentaries, a 2003 making-of
documentary and a historical documentary using archival interviews with the
real astronauts. There was also a
feature-length documentary on John Glenn made in 1998 for PBS that was
included. And of course first buyers
lucky enough to get it were treaded to a digibook release featuring notes and
pictures of the production until it sold out and the discs were rereleased in a
standard amaray case. Now in 2026, Janus
Films and The Criterion Collection have gone back to the original camera
negative for a new forthcoming 4K UHD special edition featuring not one but
three sound mixes including 2.0 stereo, 5.1 and the original 70mm six-track
magnetic mix. In addition to porting
over the extras from the Warner Brothers disc, Criterion have generated new
featurettes on the film’s extensive and pioneering visual effects and
award-winning sound design and editing.
A testament to the American dream and spirit from top to bottom, The
Right Stuff one of the greatest and most overlooked epic American
masterpieces of cinema now has a chance to get its fair handshake and due in
the hearts and minds of cinemagoers for the next millennia. 1980s American cinema rarely gets as
staggeringly powerfully monumental as this.
--Andrew Kotwicki
