Philip Kaufman (1983)

Growing up in the sixties, I was bored by the space flights (unless, to be honest, they went wrong).  I don’t know a thing about the technology of planes or rockets and I’m never moved by them as objects of beauty.  I’ve a very small appetite for adventure pictures.  It says a lot for The Right Stuff that even I really enjoyed it.  Philip Kaufman also did the screenplay, an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s famous book about test pilots involved in aeronautical research and the first American astronauts.  It’s uneven and the tone is erratic but I think this is one of the most ambitiously entertaining American films of the 1980s.   Even if the picture is too long, you can understand why – it must have been hard for Kaufman to shed material of such quality.  In any case, the 193 minutes pass amazingly quickly.

It’s evident from the start that Kaufman believes that if you’re making a film on this subject you need to see it in the context of other types of adventure hero picture.   Bill Conti’s excellent score reflects Kaufman’s approach:  it’s stirring in its own right but there are hints too of the theme music of Westerns, sci-fi and war features that tie The Right Stuff, a one-of-a-kind film, into this broader range of genre pictures.  I loved the early sequences set in and around the California air base where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947 – the juxtaposition of the amazing activities in the air and the unassuming world on the ground, centred on a rickety bar run by a woman called Pancho Barnes (Kim Stanley, in one of her increasingly rare screen appearances).  The walls are covered with photographs of test pilots who’ve died on the job.  We listen to the casual conversation of the regulars and feel their laconic admiration for the ambition and bravery of the test pilots.  The dry, dusty landscape and the feel of the place also give it something of the texture of a screen Western, and this reinforces our sense of watching men who are the pioneers of supersonic flight.  When the action moves to the Mercury 7 training programme for the astronauts, the film seems to have been propelled into a high-tech future from a distant past.

The real Chuck Yeager has a small role as a bartender at Pancho Barnes’s place.  The character of Yeager and Sam Shepard’s presence and performance in the role are crucial to the film’s scheme.  This tall, wiry figure, with his gauntly handsome, well-defined profile, supplies the externals of the archetypal strong, silent hero but Shepard’s subtlety and dynamism individualise Yeager.  You’re always aware of a mind at work and the fact that this man never gives too much away reinforces both his strength and his mystery.   The Wikipedia article on the film implies that Kaufman believed that only Yeager had ‘the right stuff’ (which I take to mean a combination of questing appetite and courage both physical and mental).  Whether or not that’s correct, the picture seems ambivalent about this.  NASA decide to exclude non-graduates from the Mercury 7 training programme, which rules Yeager out.  His lone wolf quality also seems to make him unsuitable material for the programme but Kaufman gets across both Yeager’s difference from and his kinship with the astronauts.   When he’s asked what he thinks about the nearly disastrous conclusion to Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom’s maiden space flight (which Grissom is accused of screwing up), Yeager is quick to acknowledge the astronaut is a brave man and we can see that it takes one to know one.

The seven spacemen make a great team and it’s easy to see this is largely because of the seven men playing them.  It was so interesting to see the actors in this picture, all at an early stage of their careers, a quarter-century after it was made – and to wonder whether it was obvious which of them would enjoy enduringly successful careers, or whether it’s hindsight that ensures 20:20 vision about this.  Ed Harris, as John Glenn, is the standout:  from the moment Glenn first appears, on a TV show, Harris achieves a perfect blend of charismatic and credible (and he’s wonderfully, naturally tender in Glenn’s scenes with his wife).   Dennis Quaid is hugely likeable as ‘Gordo’ Cooper (the last of the seven to make it into space and the last American to fly solo in space, in May 1963).  The cliché ‘infectious grin’ might have been invented for Quaid in this role – but what’s so good about the portrait is the distinctive combination of shallowness, generosity and cocky, game-for-anything valour that Quaid achieves.  As Alan Shepard (the first American spaceman), Scott Glenn uses his potentially forbidding looks to show how Shepard commands a wary respect but Glenn has wit too.   Fred Ward is excellent as Gus Grissom.  He has something of Yeager’s quality of reserve, which makes it all the more emotionally powerful that Grissom can’t conceal his distress when his first flight ends in what he feels, and is made to feel, is failure – Ward shows you he’ll never get over this professional and personal humiliation although he’ll manage to bury it as time passes.  (Grissom was killed in an Apollo training exercise in 1967 – this can’t help but intensify the sense of irredeemable loss.)

The other three astronauts are played by Charles Frank (Scott Carpenter), Lance Henrickson (Wally Schirra) and Scott Paulin (Deke Slayton).  The seven actors are all so good-humoured and thoroughly into their characters that they give sequences like the rigorous testing programme that the aspiring astronauts undergo much more than a documentary interest (which in itself is enough to make this section absorbing).  I would have liked to see Kaufman explore more than he does the balance between camaraderie and competitiveness between the astronauts – especially given what their interpreters are capable of.  There are other fine performers in the large cast – especially Levon Helm, as Yeager’s assistant Jack Ridley (who provides the voiceover narration at start and close of business), and Scott Wilson, as another test pilot, Scott Crossfield.  The same can’t be said for David Clennon (as a media liaison man) who, as usual, is overemphatic – and sticks out in this relaxed company.

Apart from Pancho Barnes, Kaufman doesn’t do well by his female characters.  At the Mercury 7 training centre, a nurse with facial hair and bad spectacles (Jane Dornacker) is comical-sinister in a way that feels wrong (the character seems to belong in a sci-fi spoof).  Although some of the actresses playing the astronauts’ wives are distinctive, they’re given few opportunities to do much more than react to the high-risk nature of their husbands’ occupation.  Even if the wives were, through media management of the astronauts’ lives, homogenised and reduced to the role of helpmate to a more publicly visible extent than other married women in the 1950s, it’s a pity that Kaufman doesn’t show more of the marital tensions involved in that process.  Louise Shepard (played by Kathy Baker) barely registers; Gordo Cooper’s wife Trudy (Pamela Reed) is sparky and questioning but is then forgotten about.  The Right Stuff is often convincing in inverse proportion to the amount of dialogue used to illustrate a theme or relationship but the female roles are excessively underwritten.  Kaufman occasionally seems to feel guilty and overcompensates, giving the actress a chunk of script that explains what her character is really feeling in a sudden, clumsy way – Barbara Hershey (Yeager’s wife) gets more than one of these.  When Grissom is accused of causing his own problems with his capsule, the authorities petulantly attenuate his hero’s welcome and he and his wife Betty have a set-to in their hotel room as the press gather outside.  The sequence is upsetting and well performed by Fred Ward and Veronica Cartwright but it still seems forced.  It probably works to the advantage of Mary Jo Deschanel (the film’s cinematographer’s wife) that Annie Glenn has a speech impediment.

Kaufman’s presentation of politicians and journalists is a larger problem.  From the word go, it’s crudely sarcastic.   According to Wikipedia, he cast an ‘ improvisational comedy troupe i Fratelli Bologna’ as the press corps.   He portrays the representatives of NASA (including a cartoon Wernher von Braunish German scientist (Scott Beach) and a couple of recruiters (Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer)) and of the government of the day (principally Lyndon B Johnson (Donald Moffatt)) as crass incompetents.  There are no doubt good reasons for excoriating the government and media management of the astronauts but showing the manipulators as risibly unsuccessful seems to short-change everyone.  Sally mentioned that the recent BBC programme Apollo Wives included an interview with Betty Grissom, who described how, after her husband was killed, the authorities paid for his funeral but drew the line at any kind of compensation:  Mrs Grissom and her family, of no further use, were turfed out of their accommodation and left to fend for themselves.  If this was anything like typical behaviour on the part of NASA, it’s not enough to make them a laughing stock – and there’s no vitriol in Kaufman’s approach.  (It also seems to represent a loss of satirical nerve to exempt John F Kennedy from this blanket ridicule.)  The black-clad minister (Royal Dano) who accompanies the funerals of test pilots intoning ‘For those in peril in the air’ (to the tune of ‘Eternal Father, strong to save‘), is an oddly theatrical figure.  I had no idea what was going on in a sequence set in Australia (and involving David Gulpilil, in his usual Aboriginal seer role) during John Glenn’s first solo flight, although it’s visually very beautiful.

Philip Kaufman gives you a thrilling, frightening idea of what was physically involved in breaking the sound barrier and going into orbit but the film is never emptily spectacular:  what’s happening up or beyond the clouds is always mediated and animated by the personality of the pilot or astronaut concerned.  It doesn’t mean much for me to say the picture looks superlatively well edited because I know so little about the technical aspects of filmmaking.  But I sometimes wanted almost to applaud the editing:  not just the cutting of the flight sequences that increases their excitement but also the unexpected transitions from one scene to another and the emotional key changes these produce.   The same goes for the sound.  (I was pleased to be reminded – after jotting this down! – that The Right Stuff won Oscars for film editing, sound and sound editing/effects, as well as score:  all four awards were well deserved.)  The cinematography (by Caleb Deschanel) and special visual effects (by a team led by Jordan Belson) are marvellous too.  Mock newsreel is inserted ingeniously into genuine newsreel (although a shot of the real LBJ at JFK’s shoulder is jarring when he’s also being impersonated).

The climax to the film, when Yeager is testing a new hybrid rocket and jet, is superb.  As he flies to the edge of space, he seems to be aiming not just to set a new altitude record (which he did) but to emulate the astronauts.  The sequence is torturously extended:  Yeager struggles to control the plane, then loses it as the aircraft goes into a spin and falls to earth.   I knew nothing of Yeager’s biography so assumed he’d been killed in the accident.  When the figure of Sam Shepard emerges, in the distance, from the debris, the moment is elating and funny.  It’s elating because this heroic individual has amazingly survived (although he’s badly burned).  It’s funny because you knew that the heroic icon that he also is was indestructible.

13 July 2009