If Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff is more recognizably tasteful than Popeye, it's no less ambitiously cluttered: screenwriter William Goldman famously left the project because he saw the first third of the book on which the film would be based--Tom Wolfe's same-named biography of the space-race--as dispensable, and Kaufman only proved him right with an adaptation that's faithful to a fault. Wolfe opened his best seller with the plight of Chuck Yeager, the Air Force pilot responsible for breaking the sound barrier; in Wolfe's hands, Yeager's story became an allegory of the intellectual dawn, with NASA shunning a superstar pilot for his lack of a college education. It's an eloquent preface, but it throws the film's structure out of whack: Kaufman spends a good half-hour dwelling upon a subordinate character in a transparent effort to shanghai scope into a budget-conscious affair. (Kaufman's epic pretense is unambiguous in The Right Stuff's visual quotations of John Ford, beautifully executed by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel.) Kaufman, in addition, intercuts a banquet for the Mercury 7 astronauts with Yeager's foolhardy and unauthorized attempt to take a plane as high as the stratosphere, causing Yeager (Shepard) to linger with us in an unflattering light as someone both jealous and suicidal. Someone, well, mercurial.

But the film is clumsy without being mediocre. It's eminently watchable, a mini-series made by a genuine filmmaker. Even when we don't know what the hell Kaufman is saying, such as the moment in which John Glenn (Harris), while orbiting the Earth, is besieged by "fireflies" (which Kaufman, tongue planted in cheek to pointless effect, attributes to an aboriginal campfire below), we feel he's saying it with panache, and while his inharmonious Ford worship and Dr. Strangelove-esque satire of sixties' US government come off a trifle heavy-handed, allusions to his own work are acute: there's a kind of running, tonal reference to Kaufman's ingenious remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and not just in the casting of Invasion vets Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright) in the scenes involving the astronauts' base-bound wives--especially those punctuated by the "permanent press corps" (the clown act known as the Bologna Brothers, portraying an interchangeable throng of reporters) violating the sanctity of the home--that charges them with the dread of living life as a veritable and famous crash-test dummy's significant other.

Lastly, we have Midnight Run, a charming buddy movie that has in recent years served to demonstrate the naiveté of film wags who've bought into Billy Crystal's self-aggrandizing claim that he introduced Robert De Niro to the comedy genre (nothing to brag about to start with, time has shown--but no matter); eleven years before Analyze This, De Niro played the intrinsically funny straight man to Grodin in this action-comedy from the grandiose Martin Brest. It's hard to pick bones with Midnight Run (its overreliance on the TV-theatrical punch to the face that knocks a person unconscious is the most material complaint I can lodge against it), yet that achievement in itself might handicap the movie; what the CHICAGO READER's Ben Schwartz observed of Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, which he compared to a flawless nine innings of baseball, applies here: "...The problem with a perfect game is that it's boring. The pitcher has thrown a work of art--no hits, no home runs, no sacrifices, no bottom-of-the-ninth heroics..." Everything in this movie is an asset... which makes nothing in it stand out.

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Popeye gives Paramount bragging rights to the two best video transfers of Altman films to date. (The other is Nashville.) The DVD debuts the picture in its Technovision aspect ratio for the home audience, and the 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen image is crisp and vivid, facilitating with aplomb an appreciation of the film's intricate sets and staging. The red of Olive Oyl's sweater is intense without smearing while grain is never intrusive--something we're not used to writing in the context of Altman. The film's 5.1 remix opens up the soundstage quite conventionally, giving the Nilsson ditties a bigger berth but even more beneficially clarifying the overlapping dialogue. Though Altman is not averse to lending his insights to interviews or commentary tracks, the Popeye DVD is absent of supplements.

Warner's Two-Disc Special Edition reissue of The Right Stuff leaves the film's bare-bones DVD from the late-nineties in the dust. It appears the vibrant 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer of the previous disc has been recycled, but with improvements in compression techniques over the years, the image is less prone to pixellation, and of course the old platter was a flipper--the 193-minute movie is now spread across an RSDL. The film also boasts a complicated soundmix (squealing pigs were layered in to approximate jet propulsion) in Dolby Digital 5.1 that's strong on discrete effects though somewhat polite in its deployment of the subwoofer. The second disc is reserved for extras, starting with a 24-minute segment of scenes with separate, not-so-screen-specific "cast" (I use quotes because Yeager himself joins Quaid, Barbara Hershey, Goldblum, Harry Shearer, Ward, Harris, David Clennon, Cartwright, and Pamela Reed) and filmmaker (Deschanel, producers Bob Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, Kaufman, and F/X supervisor Gary Gutierrez) commentaries. Within these otherwise-insubstantial yakkers Kaufman defines "the right stuff" as "grace under pressure" and Quaid reveals, "In the real world, I won this," in reference to the lung-capacity test undertaken by the auditioning astronauts.

Three New Wave Entertainment-produced "Documentaries"--narrated, like the film, by Levon Helm--include "Realizing the Right Stuff" (21 mins.), an account of pre-production that omits discussion of Goldman but not the unusually forthright recollections of Quaid, who says he replaced Ken Wahl in the part of Gordon Cooper and happily turned down The Outsiders to do The Right Stuff. Better still is "T-20 Years and Counting" (11 mins.), wherein the film's dismal box office is acknowledged; author Wolfe, dressed as courtly as ever, says here that the public associated The Right Stuff with a civics lesson because the studio had marketed it to capitalize on Glenn's simultaneous presidential candidacy. "The Real Men with the Right Stuff" (15 mins.), too, wins points for honesty, as Yeager and surviving space-jockeys Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, and Walter Schirra criticize the film's examples of dramatic license therein. An "Interactive Timeline to Space" that leapfrogs us to precious archival footage; the pleasant 87-minute PBS documentary "John Glenn: American Hero", completed after his historic flight at the age of 77; and The Right Stuff's theatrical trailer finish out the worthwhile package.

Universal reclaims Midnight Run from distributor GoodTimes and offers the film for the first time on DVD in anamorphic widescreen. The 1.85:1 transfer is excellent, but this is a picture that always converted well to TV; refinements are evident in the more naturalistic colour palette and curbed edge-enhancement. The accompanying Dolby Surround soundtrack is punchy for an eighties mix sans digital tampering, though the rapids set-piece would surely have profited from a dedicated bass channel. A 7-minute, untitled making-of featurette circa 1988, whose highlight is an atypically verbal De Niro, rounds out the disc along with a trailer for Midnight Run and a page of DVD recommendations.-Bill Chambers

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