(2 of 4)
If, occasionally, in compressing Wolfe's tale for the screen, he has placed too heavy a weight of meaning on single symbolic figures or forced one or two individuals to represent the qualities of many, his work is for the most part a model of sensitive, sensible adaptation. It also succeeds on two other basic levels: as a movie that sets a singular rhythm, a sort of ambling rush in which with no significant lack of narrative tension or dearth of suspenseful action, time is found for the telling details, behavioral, scenic and technical; and as a work that with its evocations of a half-forgotten movie genre, the aviation picture, suggests some sources that Wolfe missed for the code of the right stuff.
In its agreeably uncontentious manner, The Right Stuff offers an occasion for a re-revaluation of a figure recently much condemned, the traditional American male. The movie can be understood to revive that great figure of American myth, the job-and goal-oriented man, more strongly bonded to his companions in silent striving than he is to his wife and children, inarticulate not only about his fears and failings but about his strengths as well.
Beyond that, The Right Stuff, even before its official premiere on Oct. 21, is surrounded by a great, speculative buzzing. This is caused by the fact that one of its principal figures, onetime Astronaut Glenn, is currently running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sight unseen, Washington politicians, pundits and gossipists are wondering what effect a potentially popular movie may have on his candidacy (see following story). But politics aside, the movie's portrayal of Glenn aptly illustrates Kaufman's strategy in adapting Wolfe's book. In one of the author's best sentences, Glenn is described as "a lonely beacon of restraint and self-sacrifice in a squall of car crazies." In the movie, that line is given to Glenn to say, in a sweet and giggly exchange with his wife Annie, just as many of Wolfe's other observations have been converted into eminently playable dialogue. The resulting gain in intelligent self-awareness and wit adds greatly to all the astronauts' appeal, not just Glenn's.
The man who took the first crack at The Right Stuff script was star Screenwriter-Pop Novelist William Goldman. In his recent book Adventures in the Screen Trade, he notes that structurally Wolfe's book is really two books. One is about the fighter jocks turned test pilots, led by the legendary Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier. A natural pilot who graduated without benefit of a college degree from a World War II ace into test flights, Yeager, with his peers, established the exacting, unspoken standards (and style) of test flight in the late '40s. The second book is about the men who came afterward, whose success would be judged by their ability to discern and live up to the credo of the right stuff. Among them were the Mercury astronauts. Goldman saw no dramatically convincing way to contrast the experience and outlook of the two groups, and left the test-flight veterans out of his screenplay.