Film adaptation of Tom Wolfe's slightly romanticized but mostly accurate history of the seven original Mercury astronauts.

"There was a demon that lived in the air. They said that whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up; their planes would buffet wildly. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter - 750 miles an hour."

I was born in late 1964. I grew up watching launches and splashdowns. You had no choice back then, because you only had three channels and they all covered the space program live. Not that I minded. I ate space stuff like candy. A lot of my friends didn't. I never understood that. The space race demonstrated the best aspects of the human spirit. Of course, I later came to understand that the underlying motivations behind the space race were the worst aspects of the human spirit, but that's another movie.

The period of time we're talking about covers what may well be the biggest single burst of human technological advancement in history. The 20-year period from 1950 to 1970 saw more focus on research and development than any other. We certainly grew faster than in the 30 years since.

The Right Stuff is really a movie in three acts - test pilots, the beginnings of the astronaut program, and the Mercury flights. It opens with the lines quoted above, as a bunch of nameless test pilots are trying to break the sound barrier at Edwards Air Force Base in the early 1950's. Chuck Yeager - the man who finally chased the demon away - is a central figure in this portion of the movie, and his character is followed to the very end of the movie.

This is one movie, by the way, where reading the book doesn't spoil a thing. At 193 minutes, the movie is a bit of a marathon, but even at that they had to leave a lot of the book out. For instance, when Yeager pushes the envelop to Mach 2.5, he loses control of his plane and goes into a flat spin. Everyone fears the worst, of course, because with the tiny control surfaces required to fly at supersonic speeds, you just don't have enough stick to correct out of a spin. Yeager, however, stays with his plane and manages to pull it out. In the movie it's just part of his strong, silent disposition. In the book, you're told that he didn't eject because they hadn't perfected the ejection seat at that point. The seats didn't blast the pilot away from the plane, and in a flat spin the tail tended to spin around and swat the pilot like a bug. Yeager was more afraid of getting creamed by the tail than of sticking with his craft.

This movie won four Oscars and was nominated for two or three more. I never thought I'd sing the praises of Bill Conti, but I must admit he wrote an excellent (Oscar-winning) score for this movie. Sam Shepard, who played Yeager, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. It won for cinematography, and rightly so. Some elements of stock footage were used to great effect. Where scenes were married into stock footage (as when Scott Glenn as Alan Shepard received a medal from JFK), the editing was flawless.

The real technical achievement for my money is the casting. This was Ed Harris's breakthrough movie, and I don't think they could have found a better actor to play John Glenn. Harris absolutely nailed Glenn's character. Scott Glenn was also superb. Barbara Hershey gives a great performance - and looks terrific. This movie came out in 1983, the same year The Big Chill was released. In this movie, Jeff Goldblum has few lines, but they're well done in the classic Goldblum style. There's also a very young Lance Henrickson as Wally Schirra. Henrickson wouldn't break out until a few years later when he played the android in Aliens. Even Levon Helm's in this movie. Randy Quaid's in it too, but this one time he found a character (Gordon Cooper) that perfectly fits his obnoxious character.

I don't know who adapted the screenplay from Tom Wolfe's novel of the same name, but they deserve an award. They did an exceptional job of fitting a rather long book into a rather long movie.

While this book is presented as fiction, Wolfe actually stuck very close to the facts. His fictionalized parts are simply areas he had to fill in. In both the book and movie, these are well done and kept to an absolute minimum. For instance, when Mrs. Glenn (who is extremely shy because of severe stuttering) refuses to let Vice President Johnson into her house with network TV crews while her husband is preparing to orbit, we see Johnson pitch a fit in the back of his limo. Rather than a protracted rage, he slams his hat a couple of times and yells "Gladiolas! Can't anyone control housewives?" It's 100% consistent with the way Johnson was known to act.

The direction is also perfection. At the beginning of the movie we see an old man in a black suit (he looks like the Tall Man from Phantasm) walk up to a test pilot's bungalow to tell the lady of the house she's become a widow. If you watch, he's always sitting off in a corner of the bar - a constant reminder of death sitting behind these pilots. The same character is also on the gantry when Shepard walks across to enter the rocket for the first manned flight. This time, however, there's an air of success, and reluctantly he begins to applaud with the others as Shepard climbs in.

Another stunning demonstration of the director's ability is the use of the press. Wolfe was not kind to the press in his book, and the director needed a way to cast them in the proper light without taking time away from the story at hand. His solution is flawless. Whenever the press start to swarm into view, you hear the sounds of locusts in the background, intermingled with the sounds of flash bulbs and news cameras.

I can't find a single flaw with this movie. Even the length doesn't bother me, because it's covering a huge amount of material. During these three hours, man goes from 750 miles per hour to 17,500 miles per hour. Even the Sally Rand fan dance at the end, while the slowest point of the movie, doesn't seem excessive. The dance itself tells us a lot about President Johnson's perspective. During the dance, we see the Mercury Seven look away from the dance and begin looking back and forth amongst themselves. They've reached the pinnacle, and among them they share something unique to man. It's also during the fan dance that we cut away to Yeager, still at Edwards, trying to break another record by taking a plane up to 104,000 feet. He goes high enough to see the stars, but not quite high enough to touch them, like Grissom and Cooper, who left Edwards to join the astronaut program. Yeager chose his course, and he had no regrets. It's also at this point that we see Yeager lose control of another experimental plane, but this time he doesn't hesitate to bail out. We clearly see the ejection seat blast him high and clear of the fuselage, demonstrating one last advancement in this incredible period of our history.

The only reason I can see why someone wouldn't enjoy this movie is if they just failed to appreciate that both the events and people are real. The movie starts when we're about to break the sound barrier, and by the time of the movie's end, France and Russia are only a few years away from rolling out supersonic passenger liners. When the U.S. Government is trying to find people to put into space, they really did consider surfers and circus acts before test pilots. Thank God Eisenhower had some sense, because Johnson sure didn't. When the Russians managed to put Sputnik into orbit, our government really did have conversations like:

       "How'd they get a rocket up before us? Is it our Germans?"

       "No, our Germans are better than their Germans."

And if you don't understand that exchange, you probably think World War II ended in 1945, and you really need to spend a little time studying the events which began in 1914.

One last note. If this movie has been remastered for DVD, buy it. It either won or was nominated for sound, and would certainly be one of the best candidates to blow your hair back in surround sound.

• screenplay by Philip Kaufman
  based on the book The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
• directed by Philip Kaufman
• music by Bill Conti
• Cast: Sam Shepard (Chuck Yeager), Scott Glenn (Alan Shepard), Ed Harris (John Glenn), Dennis Quaid (Gordon Cooper), Fred Ward (Gus Grissom), Barbara Hershey (Glennis Yeager), Kim Stanley (Pancho Barnes), Veronica Cartwright (Betty Grissom), Pamela Reed (Trudy Cooper), Scott Paulin (Deke Slayton), Charles Frank (Scott Carpenter), Lance Henriksen (Walter Schirra), Donald Moffat (Lyndon Johnson), Levon Helm (Jack Ridley/Narrator), Mary Jo Deschanel (Annie Glenn), Scott Wilson (Scott Crossfield), Kathy Baker (Louise Shepard), Mickey Crocker (Marge Slayton), Susan Kase (Rene Carpenter), Mittie Smith (Jo Shirra), Royal Dano (Minister), David Clennon (Liaison Man), Jim Haynie (Air Force Major), Jeff Goldblum (Recruiter), Harry Shearer (Recruiter), Scott Beach (Chief Scientist), Jane Dornacker (Nurse Murch), Anthony Munoz (Gonzalez), John P. Ryan (Head of Program), Darryl Henriques (Life Reporter), Eric Sevareid (himself), William Russ (Slick Goodlin), Drew Letchworth (The Permanent Press Corps), Christopher P. Beale (The Permanent Press Corps), Richard Dupell (The Permanent Press Corps), William Hall (The Permanent Press Corps), John X. Heart (The Permanent Press Corps), Ed Holmes (The Permanent Press Corps), Jack Bruno Tate (The Permanent Press Corps), Edward Anhalt (Grand Designer), Mary Apick (Woman Reporter), Robert Beer (President Dwight D. Eisenhower), Erik Bergmann (Eddie Hodges), James M. Brady (Aide to Lyndon B. Johnson), Katherine Conklin (Woman TV Rerporter), Maureen Coyne (Waitress), Tom Dahlgren (Bell Aircraft Executive), John Lion (Bell Aircraft Executive), Peggy Davis (Sally Rand), John Dehner (Henry Luce), Robert Elross (Review Board President), Drew Eschelman (Assistant Scientist), Robert J. Geary (Game Show MC), Major Royce Grones (1st X-1 Pilot), David Gulpilil (Aborigine), Anthony Wallace (Australian Driver), Kaaren Lee (Young Widow), Sandy Kronemeyer (Cocoa Beach Girl), Frankie Di (Cocoa Beach Girl), Michael Pritchard (Texan), Ed Corbett (Texan), O-Lan Shepard (Pretty Girl), Mark Todd (Astronaut Trainee), Alan Gebhart (Astronaut Trainee), General Chuck Yeager (Fred)