The Great Waldo Pepper

The First World War is over and Waldo Pepper never got to the front. Now he barnstorms across rural America: landing in fields, selling tickets to farmers, walking on wings. The war stories he tells are not his own. Then he goes to Hollywood and works as a stunt pilot on war films. The subject is not flying but carrying a heroism you never lived. Waldo has built his whole life on the story of a war he was not in; at the end he gets the chance to live that story for the first time, and it is presented not as a victory but as a strange calm. The form has two registers: the first half has the cheer of the airshow, the second grows heavy with deaths. The audiences in the film go through the same change, laughing at first and then watching aircraft come down. The flying was shot with real aircraft at real altitude, and Robert Redford performed some of the wing work himself. Frank Tallman handled the aerial staging; he was among the best known film pilots of the period. George Roy Hill directs; he had been a military pilot himself and wrote the story. Bo Svenson and Susan Sarandon are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like aviation films and melancholy seventies American cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a consistent tone; the film turns heavy abruptly in the middle.