Saga of a Magnificent Seven

By Richard Schickel.

The Right Stuff finds heroism in the astronauts'story

Oh, it was a primitive and profound thing! Only pilots truly had it, but the entire world responded, and no one knew its name!

--Tom Wolfe

Not yet they didn't, not in 1962, when John Glenn became the first American "star voyager," the first "free man" to circle the globe in a spacecraft and match the accomplishment of the Soviets, who had done the trick first. It was 17 years before someone succeeded in naming the mysterious qualities that made Glenn and his six fellow Mercury astronauts such compelling figures.

The Right Stuff: that was the name we had been groping for. The phrase summarized the primitive and profound quality sensed beneath the space program's propaganda and the sometimes sleazy manipulations. It was, of course, Tom Wolfe who carefully defined a vague vernacular term and blazoned it as the title of his gloriously intelligent, funny and, above all, romantic bestseller "about the psychology of flying and the status competition among pilots." One suspects Wolfe's phrase is now poised for an even deeper and broader penetration into the common consciousness. For The Right Stuff, which many people thought could never be turned into a movie, is about to splash down in the nation's theaters. And despite a glitch here, a malfunction there, a triumphant landing it is likely to be.

The picture tells the story of the Mercury astronaut program, which trained seven men to be America's first explorers in space. It is big (more than three hours long), expensive ($25 million) and sprawling (covering 15 years of aviation history, from the breaking of the sound barrier in 1947 to the lift-off of the last Mercury capsule in 1963). It ranges from Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club (a raffish test-pilot bar at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert) to the Kennedy White House; from Lyndon Johnson asnarl in his limousine to the deep, deceptively serene blue of the upper atmosphere where "the demons" of the sky live. It is noisy with the roar of jet engines, the blare of military minds and the bawdiness of hospital humor as the astronaut candidates are subjected to exhaustive physical testing. It is also quiet with the tension of test flight and of the bedrooms where that tension is destroying marriages.

In short, the movie is anything but slick in structure or glib in tone. But that is far from a defect. In fact, the best thing about it is the serious but never sobersided spirit in which it was made. In the first memo he wrote about the project, Writer-Director Philip Kaufman, 46, mentioned some movies he admired, such as The Searchers and The Grand Illusion, and said he would strive for their rambling, episodic quality, in which " 'truth' is found along the way." In the end, that is exactly what he achieved.

If, occasionally, in compressing Wolfe's tale for the screen, he has placed too heavy a weight of meaning on single symbolic figures or forced one or two individuals to represent the qualities of many, his work is for the most part a model of sensitive, sensible adaptation. It also succeeds on two other basic levels: as a movie that sets a singular rhythm, a sort of ambling rush in which with no significant lack of narrative tension or dearth of suspenseful action, time is found for the telling details, behavioral, scenic and technical; and as a work that with its evocations of a half-forgotten movie genre, the aviation picture, suggests some sources that Wolfe missed for the code of the right stuff.

In its agreeably uncontentious manner, The Right Stuff offers an occasion for a re-revaluation of a figure recently much condemned, the traditional American male. The movie can be understood to revive that great figure of American myth, the job-and goal-oriented man, more strongly bonded to his companions in silent striving than he is to his wife and children, inarticulate not only about his fears and failings but about his strengths as well.

Beyond that, The Right Stuff, even before its official premiere on Oct. 21, is surrounded by a great, speculative buzzing. This is caused by the fact that one of its principal figures, onetime Astronaut Glenn, is currently running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sight unseen, Washington politicians, pundits and gossipists are wondering what effect a potentially popular movie may have on his candidacy (see following story). But politics aside, the movie's portrayal of Glenn aptly illustrates Kaufman's strategy in adapting Wolfe's book. In one of the author's best sentences, Glenn is described as "a lonely beacon of restraint and self-sacrifice in a squall of car crazies." In the movie, that line is given to Glenn to say, in a sweet and giggly exchange with his wife Annie, just as many of Wolfe's other observations have been converted into eminently playable dialogue. The resulting gain in intelligent self-awareness and wit adds greatly to all the astronauts' appeal, not just Glenn's.

The man who took the first crack at The Right Stuff script was star Screenwriter-Pop Novelist William Goldman. In his recent book Adventures in the Screen Trade, he notes that structurally Wolfe's book is really two books. One is about the fighter jocks turned test pilots, led by the legendary Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier. A natural pilot who graduated without benefit of a college degree from a World War II ace into test flights, Yeager, with his peers, established the exacting, unspoken standards (and style) of test flight in the late '40s. The second book is about the men who came afterward, whose success would be judged by their ability to discern and live up to the credo of the right stuff. Among them were the Mercury astronauts. Goldman saw no dramatically convincing way to contrast the experience and outlook of the two groups, and left the test-flight veterans out of his screenplay.

Kaufman (whose recent credits include the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) was approached to direct after Goldman's first draft was finished. He liked only one scene in it and particularly insisted on restoration of Yeager & Co. He made his case in a 35-page memo that was close to being a treatment for a total revision. He wanted the movie to be "a search film, a quest for a certain quality that may have seen its best days." The results were bad feelings, lawsuits and a Kaufman script that restored the right stuff to The Right Stuff, providing historical motivation-- the fight for pilot "dignity"--to the astronauts, whose new bosses, the engineers, scientists and bureaucrats of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration--played mainly as low-comedy bunglers and bullies in the film--did not understand their values. They wanted brave men not to fly the machines but to act essentially as lab animals whose responses to the stresses of spaceflight could be conveniently measured.

It was a job an ape could do, and did on a couple of early flights. The astronauts' fight to gain more control over their craft, to command their own fates, was what eventually earned them the grudging respect of their peers as an assertion of righteous stuff. It is as a result of it that Wolfe, and the movie, is able to reclaim heroic authenticity from publicity.

This ensemble film required a prodigious casting effort, because Kaufman is convinced that the very look of the test-pilot type has, in a generation, been all but bred out of the American bones. "I was looking for an almost obsolete type of '50s guy who was not affected by a modern look," says Kaufman. "I wanted guys who were very rugged, very tough, very honest, open guys with a clean-cut quality." He also thought it a good idea to cast people "who weren't really well known," who would be "totally eager at all times." Kaufman was extremely fortunate in finding Ed Harris, who could project John Glenn's earnestness with a boyish charm; Scott Glenn, who could do Alan Shepard's mad comic streak; Fred Ward, who could convey the inarticulate gruffness and the strange vulnerability of Gus Grissom; and Dennis Quaid, who could capture the innocent braggadocio and sublime (but not misplaced) self-confidence of Gordon Cooper. The other three astronaut impersonators--Scott Paulin, Charles Frank and Lance Henriksen--have less to do, but they do it with quiet persuasiveness.

The astronauts' wives, especially those played by Veronica Cartwright, Pamela Reed and Mary Jo Deschanel, are appealingly poignant, trying to maintain grace under the pressure imposed on them by the Government-Issue squalor of base housing and by the knowledge that their men are engaged in totally preoccupying work that carries a 1-in-4 risk of fatality. Barbara Hershey, as Yeager's wife, has, by contrast, been encouraged to emulate a classic fantasy figure. She has the smoldering spunk of the girls Howard Hawks liked to have hang around his squadrons: sexy, sassy and not as tough as she talks.

But that is all right, since Kaufman extends his mythopoetic license to the limits in expanding the role of Yeager, whom he portrays as remaining a lonely flight-test purist at Edwards for the entire period covered by the film. This is historically inaccurate--he left the base in 1954--but it is emotionally correct. Kaufman wanted to do a movie about "a particular form of American heroism" and to ask the question "How does that elusive quality survive in the midst of the American circus, the chaos, public commotion, the panic, that all threaten to stamp it out?" The answer, of course, is that it can do so only in total isolation and self-sufficiency. So Yeager's life had to be mildly, benignly fictionalized.

The movie makes its largest leap of this kind when it crosscuts between the astronauts' welcome in Houston at a suffocating barbecue inside a flag-bedecked sports arena, with Sally Rand doing her fan dance, and Yeager's last, gallant, failed effort to set an altitude record alone in the sky over his desert. In fact, the two events took place 17 months apart, and this is one of the more dubious symbolic linkages. But Sam Shepard, the playwright and occasional movie actor, has a wonderful, hypnotic stillness as Yeager. He is a solid rock on which to build a film and most pleasing to the old pilot, who worked on the film as bit player, stunt flyer and technical adviser. "He's not an exhibitionist, and he's not always putting on the air." Well, then, does that mean he has the right stuff? "It's irrelevant in my life. The right stuff. We were doing a job, and if you had the right experience and training and you were a little bit lucky, you were successful. Those that weren't, they had streets named after them."

Yes. Well, then. Perhaps this much can be ventured: if the movie does not have that almighty precious thing, at least it had the wit to look for it in the right place. Moviegoers seeking a grand yet edifying entertainment, right-stuffed with what Kaufman calls "seriousness of subject matter and a wild humor that comes out of left field," now know where to look too. -- By Richard Schickel. Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Denise Worrell This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.