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| The Right Stuff (Special Edition) [1984] | ![The Right Stuff (Special Edition) [1984]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51933FNVFJL._SL160_.jpg)
 enlarge | Director: Philip Kaufman
Actors: Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn, Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid, Fred Ward
Studio: Warner Home Video
Category: DVD
List Price: £13.99
Buy New: £7.00
You Save: £6.99 (50%)
Buy New/Used from £4.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  (23 reviews)
Sales Rank: 12684
Format: Pal, Special Edition
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
Media: DVD
Running Time: 185 minutes
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 7321901244991
ASIN: B00009PBHL
Release Date: July 28, 2003
Theatrical Release Date: October 21, 1983
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk Review
Philip Kaufman's intimate epic about the iMercury/i astronauts (based on Tom Wolfe's book) was one of the most ambitious and spectacularly exciting movies of the 1980s. It surprised almost everybody by not becoming a smash hit. By all rights, the film should have been every bit the success that iApollo 13/i would later become; iThe Right Stuff/i is not only just as thrilling, but it is also a bigger and better movie. Combining history (both established and revisionist), grand mythmaking (and myth puncturing), adventure, melodrama, behind-the-scenes dish, spectacular visuals, and a down-to-earth sense of humour, iThe Right Stuff/i chronicles NASA's efforts to put a man in orbit. Such an achievement would be the first step toward President Kennedy's goal of reaching the moon, and, perhaps most important of all, would win a crucial public relations/morale victory over the Soviets, who had delivered a stunning blow to American pride by launching iSputnik/i, the first satellite. The movie contrasts the daring feats of the unsung test pilots--one of whom, Chuck Yeager, embodied more than anyone else the skill and spirit of Wolfe's title--against the heavily publicised (and sanitised) accomplishments of the iMercury/i astronauts. Through no fault of their own, the spacemen became prisoners of the heroic images the government created for them in order to capture the public's imagination. The casting is inspired; the film features Sam Shepard as the legendary Yeager, Ed Harris as John Glenn, Dennis Quaid as "Gordo" Cooper, Scott Glenn as Alan Shepard, Fred Ward as Gus Grissom, Scott Wilson as Scott Crossfield, and Pamela Reed and Veronica Cartwright are superb in their thankless roles as astronauts' wives. i--Jim Emerson/i
Amazon.co.uk Review
Based on Tom Wolfe's novel of the same name, IThe Right Stuff/I is a spectacular and thrilling epic that chronicles the fledgling years of the American space programme, from breaking the sound barrier to putting the first man into orbit. Rather than focusing on the technological advances that made this possible, writer-director Philip Kaufman pays tribute to the daring and heroic air-force test-pilots, most notably Chuck Yeager, John Glenn and "Gordo" Cooper , whose competitive desire to be the fastest and the highest drives them to keep "pushing the outside of the envelope". Despite its grand historical scale, the movie is grounded in the emotional highs and lows of these men and their long-suffering wives, delicately balancing their personal achievements and failures with the invasive media frenzy surrounding NASA's attempts to better the rival Soviet space effort. p IThe Right Stuff/I has a coherence and pace that belies its sprawling plot, wide array of main characters and a running time of over three hours. This is thanks to an exciting script, a superb cast, Caleb Deschanel's stunning cinematography and--given the dramatic subject matter--a surprisingly humorous edge. Parts of the gruelling astronaut selection process make complete monkeys of the pilots, NASA's unsuccessful first attempts to launch a rocket are shown in all their explosive glory, and Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer steal the show as two oddball recruitment officials. p BOn the DVD:/B IThe Right Stuff Special Edition/I comes with a sizeable, if somewhat superficial, second disc of extra features. There are two separate commentary tracks pieced together from a selection of soundbites--one from the cast (including an introduction from technical advisor Yeager) and the other from the production team. Both are played out over an identical, 25-minute sequence of scenes from the film, but only refer occasionally to the action on screen and yield little insight into the film's production. p There are also four separate documentaries. The largest of these is IJohn Glenn: American Hero/I, a 90-minute PBS special charting the legendary astronaut's life and including some great documentary footage of his appearance on IName That Tune/I (recreated in the film). IRealising the Right Stuff/I (21 mins) and IT-20 Years and Counting/I (10 mins) are both standard selections of cast and crew interviews. IThe Real Men with the Right Stuff/I (15 mins) features documentary footage and interviews with the surviving members of the Mercury team (Gordon Cooper, Scott Carpenter and Walter Schirra). Deleted scenes, the theatrical trailer and an "Interactive Timeline to Space" make up the remainder. --IPaul Philpott/I
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Love-Hate November 27, 2008
I have a mixed feeling about this movie. I love it because of the effects. It is wonderfully made and all the scenes feel "real" even the clearly CGI scenes. The actors are good too, Shephard is fine as Yeager and Ed Harris is perfect in the role of John Glenn etc. What i dislike about the movie (and the book for that matter) is that it simply doesn't tell the truth and some of the scenes with Gus Grissom is (imho) close to slander -and that is slandering a dead man which makes it worse. The portrayal of Grissom as a coward who "lost his cool", panicked and sank his capsule is simply not true and it is downright mean of Wolfe to repeat those allegations. Both Chris Craft and Gene Krantz call these allegations ridicoulus in their books and both knew Grissom and worked with him.br /br /AND for the record, Yeager wasn't a roughie pilot when he made that flight in the modified F104 and nearly got killed, he was actually head of the test pilot scool that used that plane to train the x-15 pilots.
 "Oh Lord, what a heavenly light!" November 30, 2007
"There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, 750 miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the Sound Barrier. br /br /"Then they built a small plane, the X-1, to try and break the Sound Barrier, and men came to the high desert of California to ride it. They were called test pilots, and no-one knew their names." br /br /With its communal desert funerals and men riding out of the night to exchange their horses for jets, The Right Stuff's extraordinary opening places it firmly as a mythic modern western. With the West conquered and the demon in the air tamed, the new frontier is Space and the new pioneers America's first astronauts, the 'Magnificent' Mercury Seven. br /br /Picked as much for their looks as their abilities - Chuck Yeager, the legendary test pilot who broke the Sound Barrier, was rejected for the programme because he didn't go to college while John Glenn was chosen because he was good on a game show - the film strips away the NASA-LIFE magazine marketing image of all-American boy-next-door heroes for one of flawed human beings overcoming the everyday to achieve extraordinary things. Real heroes rather than manufactured ones. br /br /Yet if those around them are clowns - the neurotic double-act of recruiters Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer, Donald Moffat's Lyndon B. Johnson throwing a paddy in his car, the ex-Nazi rocket scientists singing old battle songs on lift-off - the astronauts are heroic but convincingly human figures. Surprisingly, the film also finds a lot of time for their wives, whose growing dependence on each other mirrors their husbands' camaraderie. Both male and female ensembles are excellent, but special mention must be made of Fred Ward as the ill-starred Gus Grissom and Ed Harris' upright, difficult to like Glenn. br /br /This basis in recognisable reality adds immensely to the film's impact, although one of Kaufman's most successful notions is also his most daringly stylised: making Death a flesh-and-blood character in the film, personified by Royal Dano's black-clad minister who silently strides up to test pilot's doors to break the bad news to their widows. Even when the space program begins he can be found in the crowd, a constant spectre reminding the audience of the enormity of the odds against the first astronauts. Despite the cynicism the film has for authority - "Our German scientists are better than their German scientists" - it never forgets there's something real at stake. br /br /More than anything else, it is full of honest wonder, where the truly special effects are the emotional ones, the film at times genuinely moving. Glenn's orbit of the Earth to the accompaniment of Henry Mancini's score from Kaufman's earlier The White Dawn is one of the screen's most magical moments, and the film's final line of dialogue carries real weight coming from the film's most flippant character. Nor does Kaufman forget the men who were left behind because they didn't fit the profile, Sam Shepherd's Yeager finally getting to touch the very heavens in the film's climax, the demon finally tamed and replaced with a heavenly light as the end of the great heroic era of solo test pilots - and the Mercury Seven were just that - comes to an end. br /br /With much humour and some striking, unforgettable images - Royal Dano's Angel of Death glimpsed as another test pilot sets off, the sparks from an Aborigine fire seeming to summon up fireflies in space, the suited astronauts striding towards the camera in a shot that's been imitated a thousand times since, Yeager emerging from the desert haze after a plane crash - The Right Stuff is one of the great films of the eighties, and just gets better every time you see it. br /br /Part of the last major batch of epics aimed at a primarily adult audience - Reds, Ragtime, The Bounty among them - and boasting a then-massive $27m budget, this was the last big roll of the dice for the Ladd Company, which had been started with high hopes but had been badly hit by the failure of films like Blade Runner (their only significant hit was the first Police Academy). The film's box-office failure would herald the end of the startup, but not before they were reluctantly forced to infamously heavily cut Once Upon a Time in America in the US after disastrous Cannes reviews because of theatres reluctance to book another long film after The Right Stuff. br /br /Perhaps it's that lack of success that meant that the film was only available in a standard `vanilla' edition before this special edition, but the two-disc set makes amends with some good extras. The featurettes on the making of the film could be longer and it's a shame that the audio commentaries are only scene-specific rather than covering the whole film, but there are some interesting deleted scenes that were wisely omitted. The cuts show that Kaufman at one point intended to take the comedy in a more crudely comic mode, with NASA's chief scientist and Lyndon B. Johnson's cackling crosscut with cackling chimps, and even the film's stirring shot of the suited astronauts striding towards the camera undermined by the comic capers of the press corps. br /br /The real Mercury Seven are also acknowledged in the set with archive footage, new interviews and a documentary on John Glenn as well as the theatrical trailer. All in all an impressive two-disc set for a great movie. br /
Punch a hole in the sky August 17, 2007
I saw this at the cinema when it was first released and thought I had not seen a film like it before. It was just so very different. It is a homage to the bravery and skill of the test pilots and astronauts but it is not some macho 'top gun' film. Some serious points are made. Someone says that that the astronauts are just 'spam in a can' and doing what a monkey can do. But as Yeager points out, a monkey does not know it is sitting on top of a rocket that could explode. It takes someone special to volunteer for a potential suicide mission, especially one being shown on TV.br /Some of the humor I thought were a bit clumsy. Jeff Goldblum is quite good though.br /Ed Harris is very good as John Glenn. A lot of the actors in this became much better known later. The star of the film I think is Sam Shepherd as Chuck Yeager. br /The desert scenes, especially at the start of the film, are really beautiful, such as the X-1 being powered up while Yeager sits on his horse watching it.br /The soundtrack is rousing.br /This is a brilliant, epic film. Do not assume anything about it before viewing.
 One for the specialist audience June 4, 2007
If you like the whole idea of being strapped to a bomb and basted out into space then you will probably love this film - I did. However, if you rail against boy's own adventures with techy toys then you will probablly think this film is too long.
Unappreciated classic March 20, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
When they say that the 80's were a low point in american cinema, they must have missed this film. "The Right Stuff" is big, big movie with a great story and a great cast. If this film would be released today, it probably would get more than it's good share of great reviews. Though considered as a classic, it's still in many ways underappreciated.br /br /This is the story about the early days of highspeed airoplanes and the staring of the space race between US and Russia. The story is the star of the film. The brilliant cast shines, but only the strenghten the story, never to take the focus out of the film. Cinematography is also outstanding.br / br /The movie is long, but don't be scared, it's so very entertaining that the time flies by. And this is a movie that can last repeated viewings, because it's fast amount of detail and simply because it's so much fun. "Serious" cinema that is also very entertaining is something that isn't accomplished very often. br /br /This movie has so much to offer, that there's very little to complain about. Maybe this one could have been a little longer film! For any film lover, this is one essential cinema from the eighties cataloque. And if you're interested about space program etc. this is essential. If you're just curious, well I'm quite sure that this film is worth the time and effort.
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