— RANKING: 80 —
“WAGON TRAIN TO THE STARS”: That’s how Gene Roddenberry pitched his Star Trek series at NBC. This film starred actors who were associated with Westerns on TV and in film: from left, James Garner, Tommy Lee Jones, and Clint Eastwood. Donald Sutherland (far right) rounds out the futuristic four musketeers. Courtesy: Warner Bros./Village Roadshow.
CREDITS
Warner Bros./Clipsal Films/Malpaso Productions/Village Roadshow Pictures; Clint Eastwood, dir.; Ken Kaufman, Howard Klausner, scr.; Eastwood, Andrew Lazar, pro.; Lennie Niehaus, mus.; Jack N. Green, cin.; Joel Cox, ed.; Henry Bumstead, prod. design; Jack G. Taylor Jr., art dir.; Deborah Hopper, costumes; David Amborn, Ken Ebert, John Frazier, Tom Frazier, Mark Noel, Mark Sheaffer, F/X; Barry Armour, CGI effects; Lisa Todd, visual effects; 130 min.; Color/B&W; 2.35:1.
CAST
Clint Eastwood (Frank Corvin); Tommy Lee Jones (Hawk Hawkins); Donald Sutherland (Jerry O’Neill); James Garner (Tank Sullivan); James Cromwell (Bob Gerson); Marcia Gay Harden (Sara Holland); William Devane (Eugene Davis); Loren Dean (Ethan Glance); Courtney B. Vance (Roger Hines); Barbara Babcock (Barbara Corvin); Rade Serbedzija (Gen. Vostov); Blair Brown (Dr. Anne Caruthers); Jay Leno (Himself).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
Alright, cowboys. Let’s round ’em up!
HAWKINS TO HIS “PARDNERS”
Immediately after World War II, American pilots like Chuck Yeager and Scott Crossfield set to work attempting to break the sound barrier. Their rough-hewn competitive spirit inspired the press to nickname them “Space Cowboys.” But such derring-do did not sit well with the men in suits back in Washington. When President Eisenhower determined that a revved-up rocket program should fall under the jurisdiction of NASA, Yeager, Crossfield, and other rugged individualists—none of whom possessed college degrees—were cast aside in favor of clean-cut “team players” such as John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and Alan Shepard. The sense of betrayal on the part of those early pioneers—particularly, in their realization that they would not be the first men to walk on the moon, as each had assumed—would be vividly depicted in The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1983), a docudrama based on Tom Wolfe’s 1979 bestseller. Clint Eastwood (1930–) drew on that story to create this “fiction about science.”
THE PLOT
Retired from the Air Force for more than forty years, Frank Corvin enjoys a middle-class existence. Until one day several NASA representatives arrive at his door, requesting that Frank return to active duty. IKON, a satellite sent into space decades earlier by the Soviets, will soon come crashing down. For reasons not immediately obvious, Russia wishes to intercept the seemingly harmless piece of space junk. For this, they need cooperation from the Americans, Corvin in particular. Following a spy mission, the Soviets “borrowed” the complex if now archaic system that Frank, an engineer, designed. As he’s the only person living who understands the inner workings, Frank could oversee a disabling of the satellite in the brief time before it is brought down by gravity. He agrees, but only if allowed to reorganize his original 1958 team—even though he and a member of that team, Hawk, had an ugly falling-out years earlier. A more pressing issue, however, is the real reason why IKON cannot be allowed to simply drop to Earth: it contains six Cold War–era nuclear warheads, which are about to activate.
THE FILM
Following the release of the first Star Wars in 1977 and the subsequent theatrical reboot of the Star Trek franchise, filmmakers scrambled to create elaborate space operas. But hard sci-fi filmmaking, with its emphasis on everyday realism, was largely jettisoned. Such films take place not in some distant future or far-off galaxy but the day after tomorrow or, in the case of Eastwood’s film, today—and they involve adventures that are not only possible but also likely. The mid-section of Kubrick’s 2001 adheres to this aesthetic, the effects used not to create imaginative worlds but to bring to the screen a believable vision of what will soon take place. Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) is perhaps the greatest example of this subgenre.
The image of the astronaut as a futuristic version of the historical frontiersman dates back to the early days of the sci-fi genre. Between gigs as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, Buster Crabbe also portrayed Billy the Kid in a series of low-budget oaters, or B Westerns. When Lucas first approached Twentieth Century-Fox with his idea for Star Wars, he pitched the project as “cowboys in space.” Battle Beyond the Stars (Jimmy T. Murakami, 1980), a Roger Corman quickie, cast George Peppard, who appeared in a wide variety of film projects but today is perhaps best known for his roles in Westerns (How the West Was Won, 1962), as “Space Cowboy.”
TRIVIA
Though critics rightly praised Donald Sutherland’s performance as the womanizing member of the team, they noted that, as the Canadian-born actor was usually associated with less erotic, more cerebral roles, he appeared less typecast in his part than the other three stars. In fact, the original choice for O’Neill was Sean Connery, the original James Bond, who was often associated with womanizing roles. Jack Nicholson was the first choice for the role of Tank. Garner, who accepted the part, had played a character with that nickname in the 1984 film Tank.
In 1958, the year in which this film opens, Clint Eastwood had just completed the pilot for Rawhide, while James Garner ranked as TV’s favorite Sunday night cowboy star, thanks to Maverick. In one episode of the latter series, Eastwood played the antagonist.
The craft upon which the heroes embark is Daedalus, a reference to the mythic Greek hero who glued wings to his arms with wax in order to fly.