There is no movie that pushes my patriotic buttons as deftly as Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff. Based on the book by Tom Wolfe, the film compares pioneering test pilot Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) to the seven Mercury program astronauts on the subject of what it truly takes to be a hero. As in Wolfe's book, a considerable amount of time is spent on the nonsensical experiments conducted on a group of pilots before being pared down to the famous seven candidates: Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), John Glenn (Ed Harris), Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid), Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom (Fred Ward), Donald K. "Deke" Slayton (Scott Paulin), Scott Carpenter (Charles Frank), and Wally Schirra (Lance Henriksen). The implication is that a certain amount of randomness came into play in the selection of these American idols, in contrast to Yeager's self-inspired pursuit of danger in the service of knowledge.
