My absolute favorite film of the thousands I’ve reviewed in my 32 years as a working critic? Philip Kaufman’s “The Right Stuff,” a satirical, lyrical and thrilling masterpiece about the heroes of America’s space program.
Newly arriving on a gorgeous-looking Blu-ray this Tuesday, to mark the movie’s 30th anniversary, it’s full of unforgettable scenes and iconic performances that boosted the careers of many little-known actors who comprise one of the finest ensemble casts ever assembled.
Writer-director Kaufman perfectly captures the irreverent tone of Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book of the same name as he charts the program for 15 years, beginning with Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) breaking the sound barrier in 1947 — after 60 of his fellow test pilots died in a month.
When the USSR launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and pushed the US into a space race, America’s most famous test pilot got left behind because he lacked a college degree — unlike the original Mercury 7 astronauts, who were chosen, the film makes clear, for public relations as much as conquering space.
Led by straight-arrow John Glenn (Ed Harris) and wisecracking Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), these veteran military pilots put their rivalries aside to strenuously object when NASA scientists proposed a spacecraft that the occupants would not actually be able to control.
Even after 30 years, the pre-digital special effects that Kaufman’s team devised to depict the journeys of Glenn, Shepard, loose cannon Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) and hotshot Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid) — as well as Yeager’s test flights — are still awfully impressive, conveying the beauty and the sheer terror of these extremely risky missions.
While there’s no shortage of testosterone-fueled behavior on display, “The Right Stuff” devotes much of its three-hours-plus running time to the difficult lives of the astronauts’ wives, played by such actresses as Veronica Cartwright, Pamela Reed and Kathy Baker.
One of the film’s most touching — and funniest — sequences occurs when Glenn and his comrades back up his shy and stuttering wife’s refusal to let a fuming Vice President Lyndon Johnson (a hilarious Donald Moffat) into their home for a photo op. (Mrs. Glenn is played by Mary Jo Deschanel — the wife of the film’s Oscar-nominated cinematographer Cabel Deschanel and mother of actress Zooey.)
In its ambition and unconventional casting choices — Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer play bumbling NASA recruiters, while Kaufman recruited an improv comedy troupe to play members of the press corps — the film is, in many ways, the belated last great triumph of Hollywood’s New Wave of the 1970s.
Kaufman’s most daring move is a climax where he crosscuts a party for the astronauts in Texas with a scene of Yeager setting an altitude record in a harrowing flight he barely survives.
Though it received critical raves and was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture (it won four), “The Right Stuff” was a box-office flop. Audiences stayed away, probably because the film was tied in the public’s mind to then-US Senator John Glenn’s (unsuccessful) campaign to land the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination.
But it still holds up beautifully after all these years, finding a devoted following on video and influencing other films — everything from Clint Eastwood’s “Space Cowboys” to the current cultural phenomenon “Gravity.”
As Shepard’s Yeager so memorably describes the astronauts, “It takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that’s gonna be on TV.” And a special kind of movie like “The Right Stuff’’ to depict their bravery with a wicked sense of humor.