Number 3: The Right Stuff (1983)

Who’s The Best Pilot You Ever Saw?

“Who was the best pilot I ever saw? Who was the best pilot I ever saw? Well, I’ll tell you, I seen a lot of them. Most of them are pictures on a wall, back at some place… that doesn’t even exist anymore. Some of them are… right here in this room, and some of them, are still out there somewhere, doing what they all do, going up each day, in a hurtling piece of machinery, putting their hides out on the line, hanging it out over the edge, pushing that envelope and hauling it in.

“But there was one pilot I once saw, who I think truly did have… the right—Aww, who was the best pilot I ever saw? You’re looking at him!”

Gordon Cooper, the last of the original Mercury Seven to fly, is portrayed much like I think most of the astronauts probably behaved—as a cocky, arrogant, egotistical son of a bitch. Yet to get into a rocket with a bomb underneath it waiting to push you out into space takes some kind of soul, and I think Cooper probably had that as well, along with the other astronauts. In one of the last scenes of the movie, reporters ask Cooper who was the greatest pilot he had ever seen. Cooper comes within a fraction of giving the answer before remembering his public image, stopping, smiling and giving the expected, narcissistic response. It is moments like these—which never let up—that make The Right Stuff more than just a movie about our journey into space. Any movie about that journey has a ludicrously unfair advantage on a list of my favorite movies, but The Right Stuff would have made it anyway. Enemas, bathroom trips on the launch pad, sperm tests, horses, pictures on a wall, humming, more horseback riding, John Glenn and LBJ—the moments never end.

True Story.

The movie tells the truth. It is nearly impossible to believe, but it all happened. Chuck Yeager did break his ribs by falling off a horse right before he broke the sound barrier. He did hide it from his superiors, who would in fact have pulled him from the mission had he not. “Slick” Goodlin did turn down the opportunity because they would not pay him $150,000. Yeager did need a sawn-off broom handle to close the hatch of the Bell X1. It compresses a few things as necessary, but few actual details were altered. And the movie is three hours long. That’s a whole lot of truth.

“That is a spacecraft, sir. We do not refer to it as a ‘capsule’. Spacecraft.”

Those who believe the astronauts simply rode machines into space or, metaphorically, rode the NASA program to the Moon in a passenger role, need to get a lobotomy and start over. As with all great history, the effort and sweat and tears of millions was needed to make something happen, but individuals decided what would happen. John Kennedy set the stage, Frank Borman saved the space program, Neil Armstrong kept himself from pulling “abort”, and if it weren’t for the Mercury Astronauts, a generation of kids would have grown up bored by the notion of “capsules” being sent into space. The guys at Grumman worked too long each day for too many years. Lunar-orbit rendezvous had to be dreamt up by someone. And someone had to pony up the cajones to be the first American spacewalker. The Right Stuff hails the power of the individual, and does so in a realistic, awe-inspiring manner. Any movie capable of this is worth watching, again and again and again.

Up Next: The Greatest Movie Of All Time

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