Also, age did not treat her well. Partly, it was the toll a life often lived outside takes on one’s skin. In her later years a round or two with cancer didn’t help her appearance either. I read a biography on her (not The Right Stuff) and, as I said, she was known for taking some effort in regards to her appearance, but also not having any illusions she was a great beauty. After a certain point, though, she apparently stopped taking as good of care of herself as she used to. Then, after the breast cancer, on at least one occasion when someone went to visit her she called out asking if they cared if she put on her “rubber tits” or not before answering the door. Her age when someone commented on her appearance is a significant factor in where she lands on the pretty to homely scale.
Not a literal connection, no. That’s just silly. Right after mission control gets the Landing Bag Deployed warning light they cut to the aussie suddenly looking up into the sky. It was just a bit of (somewhat hokey) dramatic license, the noble savage suddenly detected a great disturbance in the force… and took out his eye of newt & tongue of frog to help ward off the bad juju! 
During an early Shuttle landing (or launch, I forget) Walter Cronkite was there doing commentary about the early NASA days and someone mentioned this actor’s portrayal of LBJ in the film. Cronkite kind of went off about it saying that it was ridiculous the way they made him look like such a buffoon. He said he would not ever have acted so selfishly, trying to use an astronaut’s possible death as a PR stunt. Kinda has a point, it would have been a reprehensible thing to do.
I agree with you. That whole Campfire/Fireflies sequence yanked me right out of the movie. I found it jarring, utterly out of place in context of the rest of the movie. Whatever metaphoric/symbolic aspect presumably may have been intended was rendered just plain dumb by the heavy-handed not-quite-literal presentation. None of the other not-in-the-book cinematic additions disrupted the film that way.
My opinion, and I reserve the right to be wrong.
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My daughter, a CU student, lives across the street from Scott Carpenter Park in Boulder. Carpenter graduated from Boulder High School and the University of Colorado. Jack Swigert of Apollo 13 also went to CU, as did Ellison Onizuka of the Challenger disaster and Kalpana Chawla of the Columbia disaster.
Swigert was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1982 but died of cancer before he could be sworn in.
Maybe Astronauts should be wary about going on flights with CU grads. On the other hand, Carpenter is one of two (Glenn) original Mercury Seven still alive.
My father claimed my earliest memory was when somebody stuffed an F-102 into a stretch of residential back yards. Which he, of course, took me to see. And for the rest of his life it was funny how I refused to eat in the back yard. Still don’t.
Watching the movie. It conjures bad memories.
In 1972 someone crashed a (privately owned) F-86 into a Ferrell’s Ice Cream Parlour in Sacramento, killing 22 people. My (eight years older than I) sister never went to a Ferrell’s again.
Not even for two-cent soda water?
Can’t blame her. Then Flight 191 went in up the road and general av planes went into the company parking lot.
I don’t fly anymore.
I didn’t say that. The “connection,” in cinematic terms, is obvious and deliberate. I said that I didn’t interpret the movie as saying that those sparks around the ship were actually, literally from that fire down on Earth.
I mean, come on. :rolleyes:
I believe this is incorrect, at least in the sense that many people think or thought. I was given to understand that the sound “barrier” was never a real physical barrier at all. It was perceived that way, for a time, only while the reach of our engineering happened to fall just short of it–in just the same way that the four-minute mile was once held to indicate some kind of innate limit of human physiology.
Ah, so you do understand metaphor, in some contexts. 
So why not accept that the dude in Australia isn’t talking about literal space travel any more than the pilots were talking about an actual demon living in the clouds?
I may not have made it on-screen, but I think I managed to be down-camera in one shot. The scene before Yeager flies the X-1. It was a little breezy, and the X-1 mock-up was made of plywood. At least a couple of grams lighter than the real thing. So they had two or three of us get on the off-camera wing and pull our feet up to provide enough weight to keep it from rocking.
My favorite movie of all time. I was sitting on the couch reading the book when a commercial came on TV advertising the movie. Think I saw it five times on the big screen. It was at Roger Ebert’s overlooked film festival a few years ago, wish I could have gone.
They made a TV movie about Pancho Barnes about five years after The Right Stuff. Pancho was played by Valerie Bertinelli.
No, of course the ‘fireflies’ were not actual embers from the fire. That would be stupid. I thought they were supposed to be some mystical ‘protection’ given by the aboriginal shaman or whatever they’re called. The movie gave the definite inference that the aborigines knew there was a problem with the ship - the cuts in the movie showed them getting agitated at the same time that mission control was getting agitated, and it sure looked like they were jumping around in some kind of ceremony. Then embers were flying up into the sky, then the ship was covered by mysterious ‘fireflies’ and in the end everyone was okay. I don’t think those were actual embers, but there was a very strong effort made to connect it all together in some mystical way.
As for the ‘Demon who lives in the thin air’, if you read the book, it was clearly just their way of talking about the risks of pushing the envelope. But in the movie, the scenes of the planes approaching the sound barrier were shot to look like some dark hole was opening in the sky, and there even scary monster sounds. I found that off-putting as well. At best, it was heavy-handed storytelling.
That said, it’s still one of my favorite movies. There’s plenty of greatness in the film to make up for those bits. I just wish they had been left on the cutting room floor. The movie was a bit too long as it was. We didn’t need mystical aborigines.
It depends who you ask. Engineers and scientists didn’t believe there was a ‘sound barrier’. After all, we’d already been shooting bullets and V2 rockets faster than sound. So it was obviously possible. But at the same time, for a long time no one knew exactly what was going on in the transonic regime, so they didn’t know if it was within our capability to get past it and stay controllable. It was just something we hadn’t figured out. A good analogy would be re-entering the atmosphere from orbital speeds. Until we figured out how to do it, it was an insurmountable barrier.
But for pilots, it’s another matter. There certainly were pilots who thought the sound barrier was real. Pilots aren’t necessarily technically trained (though most test pilots were). Some of them can be quite superstitious or develop beliefs that are pretty far out there, just like anyone else. And after you’ve seen half a dozen pilots get killed because their controls mysteriously lock up at a certain speed and can’t be moved, or an airplane just disintegrated for no apparent reason, it can be easy to convince yourself that there’s some force out there preventing us from going faster.
So what was the metaphor with the aborigines? What do you think the filmmaker’s intent was, if it wasn’t to depict them as having some mystical ability to interact with the spacecraft, or at least some mystical connection with outer space that gave them some ability to see into it? What was the point of all that?
What was he talking about? And why film those embers and then cut to ‘fireflies’? And why have them suddenly look startled in a smash cut from the landing bag warning going off halfway around the world? Just what was Ridley Scott going for there?
I haven’t seen the movie since it came out. I liked it but didn’t like the “fireflies” or the cartoonish
portrayals of Lyndon Johnson or the various German scientists (leave the latter to Ton Lehrer). At the time it was speculated that it would help Senator John Glenn get the Democratic nomination and maybe the Presidency. Instead he stumbled (one cartoon of the era had him in a rocket on the launchpad with the nose touching the earth). Instead it turned Chuck Yeagar, who was barely known, into a celebrity and commercial pitchman.
The disappointing box office may be because while it had some good actors, none of them were “stars”.
What I took from it was that space exploration did not begin in the 1960s.
Even Stone Age man explored the heavens in his own way.
I guess it depends on one’s upbringing. I was ‘plane crazy’ since I was two, my 5th grade teacher threatened to report me to ‘The Amelia Earhart Fan Club’ for being a clown, was a voracious follower of the Apollo program, watched old airplane movies on the local channels, grew up in a military family around military bases, went to high school near Edwards (a jr. high is named for Joe Walker), had a dad whose post-Navy career was with the FAA (he once picked Yeager up in the desert after his AC Delco ultralight made a forced landing), and worked at EAFB.
So the name of Chuck Yeager was known to me a long time before the movie.
As in “slipped in the shower and hit his head.” He’d’ve been President otherwise.
OTOH, Crossfield was my god.
In the movie, Gordo demonstrated what my scoutmasters taught me: If it’s boring, take a nap. You don’t know when you’ll get another chance.
As for Pancho Barnes, there’s a lot to be said for being fun.
I’m a little confused about the “fireflies/aborigine embers” argument - because Glenn DID see these things, which later turned to be (I think) Ice particles. The movie folk just gave an ‘explanation’ for the phenomenon that explained it.
Would have been nice if they could have taken the time to explain what they REALLY were.
I don’t think Glenn’s “fireflies” were figured out until a later mission (Scott Carpenter’s, I think). Speaking of, I wish there was an expanded version of the movie that touched on Carpenter’s & Schirra’s missions. According to the book, Carpenter screwed the pooch big-time & effectively ended his astronaut career. Schirra followed up with a near perfect mission.
JohnnyL.A check out the second DVD release of the movie–it has extras including deleated stuff, you may have yet made it on to the disk.
Alas, no Blu-Ray yet.