5. The Great Waldo Pepper
As screenwriter William Goldman recounts in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, The Great Waldo Pepper was considered a "sure thing" upon its release in 1975. It was directed by George Roy Hill, who had made the hugely successful Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and whose The Sting had just won a best picture Oscar; it featured Robert Redford, who had starred in both those previous Hill productions and had also appeared in the monster hit The Way We Were; and screenwriter Goldman (Butch Cassidy, Marathon Man, Harper) wasn't exactly chopped liver. The director of The Sting reteams with Redford and Goldman, to tell the story of the last great age of American barnstormers? It couldn't miss. But it DID miss. Great Waldo Pepper -- a passion project of Hill's, based around his love of/fascination with aviation -- got mixed reviews, but more importantly, it
tanked at the box office. Goldman (and the studio) blamed a second act plot point involving the death of a major character; audiences had been able to follow Butch and Sundance to the grave and come out of the movie grinning, but Waldo Pepper's somber third act left them utterly cold. The film was considered dead on arrival, just one of those flukes; Goldman, Redford and Hill all went on to do other successful things with their careers, and Waldo Pepper was summarily forgotten about, swept under the rug.
And that's unfortunate, because Waldo Pepper is ripe for rediscovery. The film never quite reaches the heights of either Butch Cassidy or The Sting -- Goldman's script feels a little condensed, a little rushed, and some of the tonal shifts from comedy to poignancy are jarring in their suddenness -- but it's easy to forgive the few things that don't work for all the things that do work. The Great Waldo Pepper is a deeply felt elegy to a time in American history when most people had never even
seen a plane, much less ridden in one; when movie star Robert Redford lands his plane in a field and offers cheap rides to the townspeople in the movie's unforgettable opening sequence, it feels like a perfect encapsulation of a time in our history, a sense of innocence and wonder, that can never be maintained. Certainly one has to marvel at Waldo Pepper's incredible wing walking sequences; those are real actors (or at the very least real stuntmen) crawling out on the wings of those planes, and there's no CGI, no bluescreen, no way to fake it -- one false move means certain death. No movie before or since has better captured the terrifying sensation of being that high in the air, the vertiginous sense of the ground seeming to plunge farther and farther away; Waldo Pepper captures both the ecstasy and the terror of flying high, and just for that, it's an unforgettable experience.