The Right Stuff ***** (1983, Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn, Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid) – Classic Movie Review 1852

Writer-director Philip Kaufman’s exhilarating, four Oscar-winning, three-hour-plus 1983 space epic is a movie with all the right stuff itself.

There are two storylines. One is the début of America’s astronauts and the original Mercury 7 astronauts. And the other is test pilot Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard), the first man to break the sound barrier in 1947. Out of these stories emerge the themes of the flyer’s mystique, the test pilots’ obsession with qualifying to become astronauts on the pioneering space flights, and the myths of space travel.

Kaufman’s complex but clear and incisive screenplay, based on Tom Wolfe’s bestselling novel, is persuasively acted by a uniformly impressive cast, though it’s Shepard who is the movie’s mysterious but authoritative centre.

It is beautifully photographed by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel with superb aerial shots and enthralling re-enactments of space travel. Bill Conti’s music won a Best Original Score Oscar, and other Academy Awards went to the Best Sound (Mark Berger), Best Film Editing (Glenn Farr) and Best Sound Effects Editing (Jay Boekelheide). And yet, despite all these magical, highly praised ingredients, it was an expensive box-office failure.

The fine cast also includes Scott Glenn, Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid, Fred Ward, Barbara Hershey, Kim Stanley, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum, Kathy Baker, Pamela Reed, Donald Moffat, LeVon Helm, Scott Wilson and David Clennon, Incidentally, the real Chuck Yeager has a cameo as a bartender.

Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist and Oscar-nominated actor Sam Shepard died of Lou Gehrig’s disease on 27 July 217, aged 73. He was nominated for the 1984 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1852

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