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But that is all right, since Kaufman extends his mythopoetic license to the limits in expanding the role of Yeager, whom he portrays as remaining a lonely flight-test purist at Edwards for the entire period covered by the film. This is historically inaccurate—he left the base in 1954—but it is emotionally correct. Kaufman wanted to do a movie about "a particular form of American heroism" and to ask the question "How does that elusive quality survive in the midst of the American circus, the chaos, public commotion, the panic, that all threaten to stamp it out?" The answer, of course, is that it can do so only in total isolation and self-sufficiency. So Yeager's life had to be mildly, benignly fictionalized.
The movie makes its largest leap of this kind when it crosscuts between the astronauts' welcome in Houston at a suffocating barbecue inside a flag-bedecked sports arena, with Sally Rand doing her fan dance, and Yeager's last, gallant, failed effort to set an altitude record alone in the sky over his desert. In fact, the two events took place 17 months apart, and this is one of the more dubious symbolic linkages. But Sam Shepard, the playwright and occasional movie actor, has a wonderful, hypnotic stillness as Yeager. He is a solid rock on which to build a film and most pleasing to the old pilot, who worked on the film as bit player, stunt flyer and technical adviser. "He's not an exhibitionist, and he's not always putting on the air." Well, then, does that mean he has the right stuff? "It's irrelevant in my life. The right stuff. We were doing a job, and if you had the right experience and training and you were a little bit lucky, you were successful. Those that weren't, they had streets named after them."
Yes. Well, then. Perhaps this much can be ventured: if the movie does not have that almighty precious thing, at least it had the wit to look for it in the right place. Moviegoers seeking a grand yet edifying entertainment, right-stuffed with what Kaufman calls "seriousness of subject matter and a wild humor that comes out of left field," now know where to look too. — By Richard Schickel. Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles