The Right Stuff

As three-hour-long epics go, The Right Stuff (1983) is a pretty good one, bolstered by the humanized performances of a slew of talented actors portraying the men and women involved in America's race against the Russians to get outer space. The film--which was written and directed by Philip Kaufman and adapted from Tom Wolfe's best-selling book--finds a surprising balance in a story so charged with cultish nationalism. I've never been particularly interested in planes or pilots, and when I lived in Orlando, was always blasé about the goings-on at NASA just forty-five minutes away at Cape Canaveral. When people would talk excitedly about the latest rocket launch, I felt bored. This film shows exactly how exciting and meaningful it was to be a part of the space race.

As a director, Kaufman is one of the best to come out of the 70s, and The Right Stuff should probably have been his piéce de résistance, except that it wasn't successful at the box office, barely breaking even (or not) depending on which budget calculation you go with. (It was made for around 20 million, and grossed around 20 million.) Kaufman had already established himself as a fine director with the impressive 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Right Stuff isn't as canny as that film, but it's certainly as well-made and well-acted, and tries very hard to show us the many perspectives at play during this little chunk of big history. And it has a sense of humor. The grandiosity that Kaufman puts on the screen is always accompanied by a wink.

The film begins in 1947 at a military air base in the California desert, where Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) determines to break the "sound barrier," a phrase that essentially meant doom for an aircraft once it reached a certain altitude. Yeager's accomplishment (spoiler alert: he breaks it) sets in motion the events of the film which take place into the 1960s when the seven "chosen" astronauts make their various orbits into space. One of Kaufman's most adept accomplishments as director is his seamless merging of actual documentary footage of news coverage with fictionalized footage of the actors. In that sense, The Right Stuff often feels like a plucky documentary about the space age. It would have been propaganda in the hands of a less literate filmmaker. 

One of Kaufman's best instincts as director is to consider the point-of-view of the pilot's wives. On one hand, this story is every bit a tale of male achievement in a very traditional power structure, but Kaufman has a sense of realism--not to mention compassion--for the "women behind the men." Is the film accurate in its portrayal of the men and their wives? That isn't for me to say. But as a piece of narrative, The Right Stuff succeeds in multitudinous ways at being both honest and insightful about marital relations in the military and the American obsession with a kind of mythologized machismo. What's so genius is that the film mixes its criticism with its reverence in a way that feels genuine. And yet it's always sure-footed. Kaufman wants to give us a ra-ra American epic, but he wants us to think about it too, and layers his criticisms in subtle ways that allow us to come across them on our own. Otherwise it would be preachy or condescending.

As John Glenn, Ed Harris--plucked from cameo roles and TV by George Romero in the 1981 knights-on-motorcycles indie film Knightriders--shows what he's made of as an actor here. Harris is the kind of all-American actor who's very easy to root for, and his performance as Glenn paints him as a thoughtful man who took very seriously his unexpected new role as a public figure. The equally fine supporting cast includes: Dennis Quaid, Lance Henriksen, Barbara Hershey, Scott Glenn, Fred Ward, Veronica Cartwright, Pamela Reed, Charles Frank (as Scott Carpenter), David Clennon, and Donald Moffat (as Lyndon Johnson).

Secret Admirer

Michael (C. Thomas Howell) and Toni (Lori Loughlin) are childhood friends, now high schoolers. Toni has a mega-crush on Michael, but he's head-over-heals in love with her self-absorbed friend Debbie (Kelly Preston), so Toni writes him an anonymous love letter that causes a whole bunch of trouble for them and their parents. When Michael inadvertently slips the letter into his dad's night-school textbook, his mom (Dee Wallace) finds it, and thinks her husband is having an affair. The letter eventually gets seen by the dad's teacher, who happens to be a long-time friend, and who in turn believes he's coming onto her. This is the stuff of Shakespeare, people. 

Secret Admirer (1985) was directed by David Greenwalt (he also co-wrote the script, with Jim Kouf). Neither of them has the imaginative vision to take their story into original directions, so you can pretty much guess where every situation is headed, and the implausibility of it all threatens to put a damper on the good things in it, namely, its sweetness. Plot complications are the only way the writers could fill the time, while there's a wonderful pool of acting talent waiting for some good scenes.

The actors still manage to come through with some lively performances, but you wonder what could have been done had there been stronger material. Fred Ward stands out as Debbie's father, a live wire police chief who doesn't take well to the thought of his wife screwing around with one of their oldest friends. Kelly Preston seems overly convincing. She plays the shallow blonde, a girl who utters such unknowingly ironic statements as, "I don't want to go too far on our first date. Could you hand me my bra?"

Co-starring Cliff De Young and Leigh Taylor-Young as the other halves of the two grown-up couples, all of whom turn into children as fast as their own children are trying to act like adults. Michael's goofy friends (who have an amusing camaraderie together that numbers among some of the movie's most amusing sequences) are played by: Casey Siemaszko, Geoffrey Blake, Rodney Pearson, Courtney Gains, and J.J. Cohen. Also with Scott McGinnis, and a young Corey Haim as Michael's brother, who's always stealing money out of his brother's wallet.

Big Business

Big Business (1988) stars Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin as two sets of mismatched twins. One pair grows up in New York City, and now run the conglomerate started by their father; the other grows up in West Virginia, raised in a rural community that relies economically on a nearby factory and its jobs. So, when the factory, which is owned by the New Yorkers, is threatened in a liquidation deal with an Italian investor (Michele Placido) who's planning to shut it down, the West Virginia girls head up to the Big Apple for a showdown, not knowing that their enemies are their long lost sisters.

Without its cast, Big Business is a fairly limp comedy that fails to amount to anything surprising or novel. This plot has been done before at least a handful of times (going all the way back to Shakespeare and The Comedy of Errors), including with Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland in the French Revolution comedy Start the Revolution Without Me (1970). Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin generate most of this movie's appeal: When she's playing a domineering capitalist, Midler is sensational. She looks like she's having fun, and Tomlin gets overshadowed as the spacy sister who's out of place in the big city. (She was born to a humble West Virginia farmer and his  wife, who, from the few minutes we see of her at the beginning, must have died from the sheer exhaustion of bearing too many children.) She's felt out of place her whole life, just like the Midler who's grown up in the country, not knowing she had city life in her blood.

One of the problems of Big Business is that it gets sidetracked trying to think of ways for its four main characters not to run into each other. The four of them end up getting booked at the Plaza in neighboring hotel rooms, so director Jim Abrahams milks the mistaken identity plot line for more than it's worth. Abrahams uses the crusade against a giant corporation which threatens to destroy the economic means of a small town as an afterthought, a way to give the movie some kind of moral impetus, not to mention a sappy finale that will unite the girls who are so different from each other. It's probably the most obvious part of the movie (but might also be the reason it was such a crowd-pleaser.)

The supporting cast is terrific: Fred Ward as the rural Tomlin's clueless but devoted boyfriend, Edward Herrmann and Daniel Gerroll as the urban Midler's flunkies, Barry Primus as her ex-husband, Seth Green as her adolescent, out-of-control son, Michael Gross as the urban Tomlin's exasperated doctor boyfriend, and Deborah Rush as the New York girls' complaining mother (seen at the very beginning).