Have you ever wondered what it takes to win an Oscar? The 1966 film, The Oscar, revealed to audiences just how sleazy a world Hollywood can be. Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd) does everything he can to win an Oscar and he doesn’t care who he hurts! But fear not — Hollywood may not be perfect but it has no room for someone like Frankie Fane! At the end of the movie, a man named Frank does win the Oscar but his last name is Sinatra and Frankie Fane is left humiliated. That’ll teach him to try to pull one over on the Academy!
The Oscar is an incredibly silly film but it’s also a lot of fun. In this scene that I love, Frankie’s best friend — played by Tony Bennett, in both his first and final film — confronts Frankie about the type of star that he’s become.
Based on a novel by James Jones (and technically, a sequel of sorts to From Here To Eternity), 1998’s The Thin Red Line is one of those Best Picture nominees that people seem to either love or hate.
Those who love it point out that the film is visually stunning and that director Terrence Malick takes a unique approach to portraying both the Battle of Guadalcanal and war in general. Whereas Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan told a rather traditional story about the tragedy of war (albeit with much more blood than previous World War II films), The Thin Red Line used the war as a way to consider the innocence of nature and the corrupting influence of mankind. “It’s all about property,” one shell-shocked soldier shouts in the middle of a battle and later, as soldiers die in the tall green grass of the film’s island setting, a baby bird hatches out of an egg. Malick’s film may have been an adaptation of James Jones’s novel but its concerns were all pure Malick, right down to the philosophical voice-overs that were heard throughout the film.
Those who dislike the film point out that it moves at a very deliberate pace and that we don’t really learn much about the characters that the film follows. In fact, with everyone wearing helmets and running through the overgrown grass, it’s often difficult to tell who is who. (One gets the feeling that deliberate on Malick’s point.) They complain that the story is difficult to follow. They point out that the parade of star cameos can be distracting. And they also complain that infantrymen who are constantly having to look out for enemy snipers would not necessarily be having an inner debate about the spirituality of nature.
I will agree that the cameos can be distracting. John Cusack, for example, pops up out of nowhere, plays a major role for a few minutes, and then vanishes from the film. The sight of John Travolta playing an admiral is also a bit distracting, if just because Travolta’s mustache makes him look a bit goofy. George Clooney appears towards the end of the film and delivers a somewhat patronizing lecture to the men under his command. Though his role was apparently meant to be much larger, Adrien Brody ends up two lines of dialogue and eleven minutes of screentime in the film’s final cut.
That said, The Thin Red Line works for me. The film is not meant to be a traditional war film and it’s not necessarily meant to be a realistic recreation of the Battle of Guadalcanal. Instead, it’s a film that plays out like a dream and, when viewed a dream, the philosophical voice overs and the scenes of eerie beauty all make sense. Like the majority of Malick’s films, The Thin Red Line is ultimately a visual poem. The plot is far less important than how the film is put together. It’s a film that immerses you in its world. Even the seeming randomness of the film’s battles and deaths fits together in a definite patten. It’s a Malick film. It’s not for everyone but those who are attuned to Malick’s wavelength will appreciate it even if they don’t understand it.
And while Malick does definitely put an emphasis on the visuals, he still gets some good performances out of his cast. Nick Nolte is chilling as the frustrated officer who has no hesitation about ordering his men to go on a suicide mission. Elias Koteas is genuinely moving as the captain whose military career is ultimately sabotaged by his kind nature. Sean Penn is surprisingly convincing as a cynical sergeant while Jim Caviezel (playing the closest thing the film has to a main character) gets a head start on humanizing messianic characters by playing the most philosophical of the soldiers. Ben Chaplin spends most of his time worrying about his wife back home and his fantasies give us a glimpse of what’s going on in America while its soldiers fight and die overseas.
The Thin Red Line was the first of Terrence Malick’s films to be nominated for Best Picture and it was one of three World War II films to be nominated that year. However, it lost to Shakespeare In Love.
Wait, that can’t be right, can it? Bill Murray and Harold Ramis were cinematic anarchists. Early in his career, Bill Murray was the ultimate smart aleck slacker who did not have any respect for authority. Harold Ramis was hardly a slacker but he came across as someone more likely to be marching on the Pentagon than guarding it. Stripes is one of the ultimate examples of a comedy where the laughs come from things that don’t seem to go together suddenly going together.
John Winger (Murray) at least has a reason to join the army. He has a dead end job. He has just broken up with his girlfriend. The country appears to be at peace so why not spend four years in the Army? It’s harder to understand why John’s friend, Russell (Ramis), also decides to enlist, other than to hang out with John. Along with Ox (John Candy), Cruiser (John Diehl), Psycho (Conrad Dunn), and Elm0 (Judge Reinhold), they enlist and go through basic training under the watchful eye of Sgt. Hulka (Warren Oates). John and Russell go from treating everything like a joke to invading East Germany in a tank that’s disguised as an RV. They also meet the two sexiest and friendliest MPs in the service, Stella (P.J. Soles) and Louise (Sean Young). Russell goes from being an proto-hippie who teaches ESL to asking John if he thinks he would make a good officer. John goes from not taking anything seriously to picking up a machine gun and rescuing his fellow soldiers.
It’s a comedy that shouldn’t work but it does. It’s actually one of my favorite comedies, full of memorable lines (“Lighten up, Frances.”), and stupidly funny situations. The cast is full of future comedy legends and P.J. Soles shows that she deserved to be a bigger star. This was early in Bill Murray’s film career and he was still largely getting by on his SNL persona but, in his confrontations with Hulka, Murray got a chance to show that he could handle drama. With all the comedic talent in the film, it’s Warren Oates who gets the biggest laughs because he largely plays his role straight. Sgt. Hulka is a drill sergeant who cares about his men and who knows how to inspire and teach but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about having to deal with a collection of misfits. (Watch his face when Cruiser says he enlisted so he wouldn’t get drafted.)
The movie does get strange when the action goes from the U.S. to Germany. What starts out as Animal-House-In-The-Army instead becomes an almost straight action movie and the movie itself sometimes feels like a recruiting video. Join the Army and maybe you’ll get to steal an RV with PJ Soles. That would have been enough to get me to enlist back in the day. But the combination of Murray, Ramis, and Oates makes Stripes a comedy that can be watched over and over again.
Germany is living in a state of terror. A serial killer known as The Calendar Killer has been brutally murdering people across the country. The killer leaves the date of the murder on the wall, written in his victim’s blood. His victims are given the choice between killing their husband or being killed themselves. Hey, Calendar Kill — not everyone’s a murderer, okay!? Seriously, what a jerk.
(As a sidenote, who knew that Saw was popular enough to inspire a copycat in Germany? Cinema truly is the international art form.)
A few days ago, Klara (Luise Heyer) woke to a terrifying message on a wall, telling her that either she or husband would die on December 6th. Now, it’s December 6th and Klara is walking home at night. She calls a helpline for women who are outside and alone at night. Jules (Sabin Tambrea) answers. Even though Jules is soft-spoken and careful to choose his words with sensitivity, Klara is hesitant to tell her about either the Calendar Killer or her husband. When Jules finally coaxes the details out of her, she reveals that she is married to Martin (Friedrich Mucke). Martin is an prominent politician but he’s an abusive husband, one who forced Klara to take part in a humiliating orgy that was apparently inspired by watching Eyes Wide Shut one too many times.
(Saw and Eyes Wide Shut, we now know what’s inspiring the Germans.)
Klara is not only fleeing the Calendar Killer but her husband as well. When she attempts to commit suicide, Jules begs her to live and to keep fighting. Jules talks about his own tragic past, about how his wife committed suicide and he lost a child in a fire that broke out the same night. Even though Jules is not supposed to leave his apartment and is having quite a few personal issues of his own, he sets out to find Klara.
The Calendar Killer gets off to a good start but it goes off the rails as it progresses. There’s a few too many coincidences and the big twist is one that you will see coming from miles away. The problem with the twist isn’t that it’s predictable as much as it’s one that makes less and less sense the more that you think about it. It makes you realize just how implausible the whole Calendar Killer thing is. There are a few genuinely creepy scenes and Luise Heyer is a sympathetic heroine but, in the end, the film is never as thought-provoking or emotionally moving as it presents itself as being. The film attempts to end on a note of empowerment but it doesn’t quite feel earned. If the film had fully embraced its grindhouse potential, it would have been an entertaining B-movie with a worthy message. Instead, it strikes an uneasy balance between being a bloody horror film and being a message film and, as a result, it really doesn’t feel like it truly commits to either.
It’s a shame. The film definitely had potential but, in the end, it just doesn’t come together.
In the 1999 Best Picture Nominee, The Insider, the American media takes a beating.
Al Pacino plays Lowell Bergman. Bergman is a veteran newsman who, for several years, has been employed as a producer at 60 Minutes. He is a strong believer in the importance of the free press and he’s proud to be associated with both 60 Minutes and CBS News. He’s one of the few people who can manage the famously prickly correspondent, Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer). When we first see Bergman, he and Wallace are in the Middle East and arranging a tense interview with the head of Hezbollah. It’s easy to see that Bergman is someone who will go anywhere and take any risk to get a story. It’s also apparent that Bergman thinks that the people that he works with feel the same way.
That all changes when Bergman meets Jeffery Wigand (Russell Crowe), a recently fired tobacco company executive who initially agrees to serve as a consultant for one of Bergman’s story but who leaves Bergman intrigued when he reveals that, due to a strict confidentiality agreement, he’s not allowed to discuss anything about his time as an executive. As the tobacco companies are currently being sued by ambitious state attorney generals like Mississippi’s Mike Moore (who plays himself in the film), Bergman suspects that Wigand knows something that the companies don’t want revealed.
And, of course, Bergman is right. Wigand was fired for specifically objecting to his company’s effort to make cigarettes more addictive, something that the tobacco industry had long claimed it wasn’t doing. Wigand’s pride was hurt when he was fired but he knows that breaking the confidentiality agreement will mean losing his severance package and also possibly losing his marriage to Liane (Diane Venora) as well. However, Wigand is angered by the heavy-handed techniques that his former employer uses to try to intimidate him. He suspects that he’s being followed and he can’t even work out his frustrations by hitting a few golf balls without someone watching him. When Wigand starts to get threats and even receives a bullet in the mail, he decides to both testify in court and give an interview to Wallace and 60 Minutes.
The only problem is that CBS, after being pressured by their lawyers and facing the risk of taking a financial loss in an upcoming sell, decides not to run the interview. Bergman is outraged and assumes that both Mike Wallace and veteran 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall) will support him. Instead, both Wallace and Hewitt side with CBS. Left out in the cold is Jeffrey Wigand, who has sacrificed almost everything and now finds himself being attacked as merely a disgruntled employee.
Directed by Michael Mann and based on a true story, The Insider is what is usually described as being “a movie for adults.” Instead of dealing with car chases and super villains and huge action set pieces, The Insider is a film about ethics and what happens when a major media outlet like CBS News fails to live up to those ethics. (No one is surprised when the tobacco company tries to intimidate and silence Wigand but the film makes clear that people — or at least people in the 90s — expected and hoped for more from the American press.) Wigand puts his trust in Bergman and 60 Minutes largely because he believed Bergman’s promise that he would be allowed to tell his story. It’s a promise that Bergman made in good faith but, in the end, everyone from the CBS executives to the tobacco companies is more interested in protecting their own financial future than actually telling the truth. Wigand loses his family and his comfortable lifestyle and Bergman loses his faith in the network of Edward R. Murrow. It’s not a particularly happy film but it is a well-made and thought-provoking one.
Pacino and Crowe both give excellent performances in the two lead roles. Pacino, because he spends most of the film outraged, has the flashier role while Crowe plays Wigand as a rather mild-mannered man who suddenly finds himself in the middle of a national news story. (Crowe’s performance here is one of his best, precisely because it really is the opposite of what most people expect from him.) Crowe does not play Wigand as being a crusader but instead, as an ordinary guy who at times resents being put in the position of a whistleblower. (Director Mann does not shy away from showing how Bergman manipulates, the reluctant Wigand into finally testifying, even if Bergman’s motives were ultimately not malicious.) That said, the strongest performance comes from Christopher Plummer, who at first seems to be playing Mike Wallace as being the epitome of the pompous television newsman but who eventually reveals the truth underneath Wallace’s sometimes fearsome exterior.
The Insider was nominated for Best Picture. Somehow, it lost to American Beauty.
After being passed over twice as a result of both a “brushing incident” with a Russian submarine and an embarrassing tattoo, Lt. Commander Thomas Dodge (Kelsey Grammer, playing Dodge as being the laid back opposite of Frasier Crane) has finally been promoted and given his own submarine to command. The catch is that the submarine is a rusty piece of junk from World War II and he’s been assigned a crew of misfits. Captain Dodge is to take part in a war game. Admiral Winslow (Rip Torn) wants Dodge to prove that even an out-of-commission submarine can be dangerous by infiltrating Charleston Harbor undetected and then blowing up a dummy warship in Norfolk Harbor. If Dodge is successful, he’ll get a nuclear submarine to command. If he fails, he’ll be assigned of desk job and probably leave the Navy. While the sympathetic Winslow encourages Dodge to “think like a pirate,” the antagonistic Admiral Graham (Bruce Dern) pulls out all the stops to make sure Dodge fails.
I imagine that Down Periscope was probably pitched as Police Academy In The Navy and it follows the general rules of the Police Academy films, right down to casting Lauren Holly as the one woman on the submarine who has to overcome her own insecurities and prove herself to all the men. Unfortunately, none of the misfits on the crew are as memorable as the cadets from Police Academy and the movie’s attempts to mix juvenile humor with suspenseful naval action are not at all successful. Having Rob Schneider go totally over the top as Dodge’s second-in-command while having William H. Macy give a serious performance as the captain assigned to prevent Dodge from reaching the harbor indicates that Down Periscope has a definite identity problem.
Harry Dean Stanton plays Howard, who is the submarine’s chief engineer and who uses whiskey as a fuel to keep the submarine moving. Toby Huss has a few amusing moments as the electrician who keeps electrocuting himself. Grammer, Dern, and Macy have more than proven their talents in other projects and Rip Torn will always be remembered for bringing Artie to profane life on The Larry Sanders Show. Director David Ward also directed Major League and wrote The Sting. A lot of talent went into making Down Periscope so it’s a shame the film wasn’t more memorable.
Some of the most inventive action films have been coming out of Southeast Asia these past 20 or so years. It was led by the very entertaining and brutal actions films headlined by martial artist turned action star Tony Jaa from Thailand then followed up by Indonesian action star Iko Uwais from The Raid series by Welsh director Gareth Edwards.
In 2018, Netflix bought the distribution rights for an Indonesian action thriller from director Timo Tjahjanto that starred the aforementioned Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Julie Estelle and a who’s who of Indonesia’s acting scene. At first glance, The Night Comes for Us looked to cash-in o the popularity of Gareth Edwards’ The Raid series, but one would be both mistaken and remiss to think such a thing.
The Night Comes for Us looked at Edwards’ The Raid duology and thought to itself that the action wasn’t brutal and visceral enough so decided to rectify that missed opportunity. Timo Tjahjanto took what he learned from his past work on horror films and decided to add some of those visual storytelling techniques to an action film that one would either have a hard time to sit through while viewing or just gobble with up with glee.
Guilty pleasure doesn’t mean the film has to be cheaply made or seen as being bad it’s good type of thing. I always thought that its something that one enjoyed despite knowing that there’s many out there who would look at someone askance for enjoying such a low-brow affair. The Night Comes for Us is both visually stunning in its production yet still has that low-down, grungy feel to it that harkens back to the hey day of grindhouse films of the 70’s and early 80’s. The only thing missing from this film was film grain imperfections such as film scratches and flaws to give it that 42nd street, NYC movie theater circa 1970’s experience (stale, days old popcorn and sticky floors included).
This film has it all and it has it in such abundance that one might just forgive Timo Tjahjanto for overdoing things when it came to the brutal violence that in years past would’ve earned it the dreaded XXX thus endearing it to the grindhouse crowd. The film actually opens up and ends in one of the few calm and introspective scenes with everything else in-between just straight up violence both hand-to-hand and gun variety. The Night Comes for Us is the film version of that saying “it woke up and chose violence.”
Joe Taslim headlines the film and he gives such a visceral and unhinged performance that one would be forgiven for mistaking his character as the villain if seeing the film in the middle after missing the beginning. Iko Uwais usually plays the reluctant hero in his previous films, but gets to let loose in a more antagonist role that more than matches Taslim when the two finally square off each other. The other stand-out performance to highlight would be Julie Estelle as The Operator who can throw down just as extreme as the men and, in fact, her fight scenes are pretty much the most brutal in the whole film and that is saying a lot.
So yeah, The Night Comes for Us, go see it and be horrified and/or amazed in equal measure. I guarantee that even if you hate the experience you won’t say that it was ever boring or bland.
In Reagan, Dennis Quaid stars at the 40th President of the United States.
Framed as a story being told by a former KGB agent (Jon Voight) who is attempting to make a younger politician understand why Russia lost the Cold War, Reagan starts with Reagan’s childhood, includes his time as an actor and as the anti-communist head of the SAG, and then gets into his political career. Along the way, several familiar faces pop up. Robert Davi plays a thuggish Russian leader. Mena Suvari plays Reagan’s first wife while Penelope Ann Miller plays his second. Xander Berekely plays George Schultz (who was just previously played by Sam Waterston in The Dropout miniseries.) C. Thomas Howell, Kevin Dillon, Dan Lauria, and Lesley-Anne Down all have small but important roles. And the usual suspects when it comes to conservative filmmaking — Nick Searcy, Kevin Sorbo, and Pat Boone — are there to compliment Voight and Davi. I was a little surprised to see that Dean Cain was not present.
As usually happens to films that feature sympathetic Republicans, Reagan was slammed by critic but better-appreciated by the audience for which the film was made. I wasn’t particularly surprised. Movie critics tend to be liberal and Reagan is very much not that. For a professional film critic, a film like Reagan must be met with snark and derision because otherwise, one would risk cancellation. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that there aren’t things to criticize about Reagan the film. I’m just saying that one should always keep in mind that critics have their own individual biases. One reason why the Rotten Tomatoes score is such an unfortunate development is because it ignores the fact that most films have things that work and things that don’t work and that quality is often in the eye of the beholder. Instead, it just tells us that a film is either a 90% or a 10%.
As for Reagan, it’s definitely a bit on the heavy-handed side but, then again, I think the same can be said for just about every political film that’s come out over the last few decades. For those who claim Reagan is somehow more heavy-handed than most, I invite them to sit through Rob Reiner’s LBJ. Indeed, the only director who has really shown a willingness to admit that a President can be both good and bad was Oliver Stone and when was the last time anyone watched Nixon? Reagan is at its weakness when it tries to recreate Reagan’s time as an actor. Dennis Quaid gives a good and charming performance throughout the film but he’s also 70 years old and, in the scenes where he plays the youngish Ronald Reagan, all of the soft-lighting and Vaseline on the lens ends up making him look like a wax figure. Once Reagan gets older, Quaid is allowed to act his age and both he and the film become much more convincing. I enjoyed the film once Reagan became President, though you should understand that I have biases of my own. I’m a fan of low taxes and individual freedom, which is why I’m also not a fan of communism or, for that matter, any extreme ideology that attempts to tell people how to live or think. “Tear down this wall!” Regan says while standing in front of the Berlin Wall and it’s a rousing moment, both in reality and on film.
In the end, Reagan is a film that will be best appreciated by people who already like Ronald Reagan. Yes, the film is heavy-handed and the framing device is a bit awkward. But Dennis Quaid’s heartfelt (and, towards the end, heartbreaking) performance carries the film. The film is not at all subtle but you know what? I’ve seen a countless number of mediocre films that have portrayed Reagan negatively, often with as little nuance and just as heavy-handed an approach as Reagan uses in its positive portrayal of the man. I sat through The Butler, for God’s sake. There’s nothing wrong with having a film that looks at the man from the other side. Those who like Ronald Reagan will feel vindicated. Those who don’t will say, “What was up with that Pat Boone scene?”
The great director Federico Fellini was born, on this day, 125 years ago.
He was born in Rimini. That’s in Northern Italy. (The Italian side of my family comes from Southern Italy and yes, there is a difference.) Fellini was 19 years old when he enrolled in law school but records, which were admittedly spotty at the time, seem to indicate that he never attended a single class. Instead, Fellini found work as a writer, working first as a journalist and then a screenwriter. (He was one of the many credited for writing the screenplay for Rome, Open City.) He began his directing career as a neorealist in the 50s but soon crafted his own unique style, one which openly mixed humor with drama and fantasy with earthiness. Fellini established himself as one of the world’s best directors, a filmmaker who made art films that not only entertained but also provoked thought. Fellini was a director who embraced life’s contradictions as well as being a strong anti-authoritarian who rarely commented on politics but did make known his distaste for communism. He was also one of Mario Bava’s best friends.
My favorite Fellini film is 1960’s La Dolce Vita.
Ah, to be rich, decadent, and jaded in Rome in the early 60s! Or maybe not. Sometimes, being jaded is not as much fun as it seems.
La Dolce Vita is largely remembered for the scene in which actress Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) and journalist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) wade into Rome’s Trevi Fountain. While that it is a great and sensual scene and justifiably famous (and, in fact, the film’s poster was originally a shot of Ekberg in the fountain despite the fact that the scene is only a small part of a 3-hour movie), it’s often overlooked that the scene itself does not have a happy ending. When Marcello and Sylvia return to Sylvia’s hotel, Sylvia is slapped by her loutish boyfriend (played by Lex Barker). Marcello, meanwhile, has a fiancée named Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) who is recovering from a recent overdose. Even though Marcello swears that he loves Emma and that he would do anything for her, he is still compulsively unfaithful.
When we first meet Marcello, he’s in a news helicopter, watching as a statue of Jesus is flown over Rome. However, Marcello is distracted by the sight of a group of women sunbathing on a nearby rooftop and he tries to get their phone numbers before returning to following the statue. That pretty much sets the tone for most of what we see of Marcello over the course of La Dolce Vita. He’s searching for the profound and transcendent but he frequently gets distracted by his own more earthy desires.
The film follows Marcello as he encounters different people in Rome and the surrounding area. Some of them are rich and some of them are poor. All of them are looking for something but none of them seem to be quite sure what it is. A possible sighting of the Madonna brings a crowd of people to the outskirts of Rome, where everyone asks for something but the end result is only chaos. A meeting with an intellectual friend of Marcello seems to offer a solution to Marcello’s ennui until a tragedy reveals that his friend was even more lost than Marcello. (The film’s sudden tragic turn took me very much by surprise when I first saw it, despite the fact that countless filmmakers have imitated the moment since.) A possibly important conversation on a beach is made unintelligible by the crashing waves and, instead of providing enlightenment, it ends with a shrugs and an enigmatic smile. There’s a definite strain melancholy running through the film though there’s also a certain joi de vivre to many of Marcello’s adventures. Marcello is torn between seeking transcendence and seeking pleasure. Fellini shows us that both are equally important. It’s left to use to decide whether the pleasure is worth the heartache and vice versa.
La Dolce Vita is visually stunning portrait of life in Rome at a very particular cultural moment. Marcello Mastroianni is the epitome of decadent cool in the lead role but he’s also a good enough actor to let us see that Marcello is never quite as proud of himself or as happt with his life as everyone assumes he is. La Dolce Vita may be about a specific cultural moment but, as a film, it is timeless.
There’s a brilliant scene that occurs towards the end of 1983’s The Right Stuff.
It takes place in 1963. The original Mercury astronauts, who have become a symbol of American ingenuity and optimism, are being cheered at a rally in Houston. Vice President Lyndon Johnson (Donald Moffat) stands on a stage and brags about having brought the astronauts to his supporters. One-by-one, the astronauts and their wives wave to the cheering crowd. They’re all there: John Glenn (Ed Harris), Gus Grissom (Fred Ward), Alan Shephard (Scott Glenn), Wally Schirra (Lance Henrisken), Deke Slayton (Scott Paulin), Scott Carpenter (Charles Frank), and the always-smiling Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid). The astronauts all look good and they know how to play to the crowd. They were chosen to be and sold as heroes and all of them have delivered.
While the astronauts are celebrated, Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) is at Edwards Air Force Base. Yeager is the pilot who broke the sound barrier and proved that the mythical “demon in the sky,” which was whispered about by pilots as a warning about taking unnecessary risks, was not waiting to destroy every pilot who tried to go too fast or too high. Yeager is considered by many, including Gordon Cooper, to be the best pilot in America. But, because Yeager didn’t have the right image and he had an independent streak, he was not ever considered to become a part of America’s young space program. Yeager, who usually holds his emotions in check, gets in a jet and flies it straight up into the sky, taking the jet to the edge of space. For a few briefs seconds, the blue sky becomes transparent and we can see the stars and the darkness behind the Earth’s atmosphere. At that very moment, Yeager is at the barrier between reality and imagination, the past and the future, the planet and the universe. And watching the film, the viewer is tempted to think that Yeager might actually make it into space finally. It doesn’t happen, of course. Yeager pushes the jet too far. He manages to eject before his plane crashes. He walks away from the cash with the stubborn strut of a western hero. His expression remains stoic but we know he’s proven something to himself. At that moment, the Mercury Astronauts might be the face of America but Yeager is the soul. Both the astronauts and Yeager play an important role in taking America into space. While the astronauts have learned how to take care of each other, even the face of government bureaucracy and a media that, initially, was eager to mock them and the idea of a man ever escaping the Earth’s atmosphere, Chuck Yeager reminds us that America’s greatest strength has always been its independence.
Philip Kaufman’s film about the early days of the space program is full of moments like that. The Right Stuff is a big film. It’s a long film. It’s a chaotic film, one that frequently switches tone from being a modern western to a media satire to reverent recreation of history. Moments of high drama are mixed with often broad humor. Much like Tom Wolfe’s book, on which Kaufman’s film is based, the sprawling story is often critical of the government and the press but it celebrates the people who set speed records and who first went into space. The film opens with Yeager, proving that a man can break the sound barrier. It goes on to the early days of NASA, ending with the final member of the Mercury Seven going into space. In between, the film offers a portrait of America on the verge of the space age. We watch as John Glenn goes from being a clean-cut and eager to please to standing up to both the press and LBJ. Even later, Glenn sees fireflies in space while an aborigines in Australia performs a ceremony for his safety. We watch as Gus Grissom barely survives a serious accident and is only rescued from drowning after this capsule has been secured. The astronauts go from being ridiculed to celebrated and eventually respected, even by Chuck Yeager.
It’s a big film with a huge cast. Along with Sam Shepherd and the actors who play the Mercury Seven, Barbara Hershey, Pamela Reed, Jeff Goldblum, Harry Shearer, Royal Dano, Kim Stanley, Scott Wilson, and William Russ show up in roles both small and large. It can sometimes be a bit of an overwhelming film but it’s one that leaves you feeling proud of the pioneering pilots and the brave astronauts and it leaves you thinking about the wonder of the universe that surrounds our Earth. It’s a strong tribute to the American spirit, the so-called right stuff of the title.
The Right Stuff was nominated for Best Picture but, in the end, it lost to a far more lowkey film, 1983’s Terms of Endearment. Sam Shepard was nominated for Best Supporting Actor but lost to Jack Nicholson. Nicolson played an astronaut.
Through the Shattered Lens 