The Right Stuff

Phillip Kaufman’s, The Right Stuff is the film adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book about test pilots and the space race. Wolfe is one of my favourite authors, but strangely I have never read The Right Stuff. It’s an epic movie, in length and subject matter. Filled with wonderful performances, such as Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager, acknowledged as the best test pilot of his time, and Ed Harris as John Glenn, the pioneering Astronaut and later US Senator. There are great scenes, such as the very effective opening which portrays a test flight gone tragically wrong. The format switches to widescreen and colour from black & white at the moment of impact. I often wonder whether Wolfe’s sceptical humour can be translated to the screen – here it is done well, not pointedly, but you can tell how these pilots would have rankled at the idea of being substitutes for monkeys. In the first space missions no pilot input was required, all they had to do was sit tight. This should not demean in any way the courage it took to go up in these first flights. As someone says in the movie: “The monkey doesn’t know its sitting on top of a rocket.”