Word: rightnesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...unreasonable expectations of fans. The film opens with suitably celestial music as the star of Bethlehem scoots in from the galactic end-zone. Three camels with robed riders poke their way across a sea of sand-dunes, towards a shabby huddle of huts and mangers. It could all be right out of Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" down to the last sunbeam...
LIFE OF BRIAN does not do the job on the gospels that Holy Grail did on the Arthurian legends. The scope is more timid, the technique less audacious. We had a right to expect better, funnier, or at least wilder. The more slavishly Monty Python tries to follow conventions--the more they tailor their films to play in Peoria--the less anyone will laugh at them. The film remains only a funny shadow of what might have been--like Jesus Christ beating a dead parrot...
...crammed with inside poop and racy incident that 19 years ago was ignored by what he terms the "proper Victorian Gents" of the press. The fast cars, booze, astro groupies, the envies and injuries of the military caste system were not part of what Americans would have considered the right stuff. Wolfe lays it all out in brilliantly staged Op Lit scenes: the tacky cocktail lounges of Cocoa Beach where one could hear the Horst Wessel Song sung by ex-rocket scientists of the Third Reich; Vice President Lyndon Johnson furiously cooling his heels outside the Glenn house because Annie...
...catching: a tall, pale, boyish figure whose trademark was a gleaming white suit. He looked like a collegian out of Held's Angels, or a swell in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. Raised in Richmond, Va., Wolfe spoke softly and courteously, exuding an air of the right stuff. But he wrote like a hit man. "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" was a surprise attack on the genteel New Yorker magazine and its shy, venerated editor, William Shawn. A shocked cultural establishment struck back. An outraged...
Wolfe is certainly a man who would rather lead than follow. The Right Stuff grew out of his "curiosity about what made men shoot dice with death." What he discovered in thousands of miles and more than 100 interviews was that pilots lived "in a world where there are no honorable alternatives." Wolfe has already done all the research on Gemini, Apollo and Skylab, and plans to write about them as well. Why did the current book take six years? "It was a structural problem," he says. "There are no surprises in the plot and a great many characters...