When The Great Waldo Pepper opens with the now obligatory nostalgia of an evocative montage of period photographs, it looks as though one is in for another no-holds-barred assault on the box-office. As it turns out, George Roy Hill keeps his penchant for whimsy well under control, only once, and quite acceptably—the winning smile near the beginning which tells us that Waldo won't really be so mean-spirited as to fail to keep his promise of a free ride to the boy who has laboured all afternoon on his behalf—fringing the cuteness which marred Butch Cassidy and The Sting. [Roger] Corman's The Red Baron, of course, dug much deeper into the mystique of daredevilry and deathwish associated with World War One aces; but in this third exploration of shrinking frontiers, which is really a homage from one dream factory to another closed long ago by the encroachments of civil aviation and safety regulations, Hill acknowledges quite early on … that his movie is only a movie, and rooted in the early days of innocence and adventure somewhere between The Perils of Pauline (the rivetingly funny and exciting scene of Mary Beth's only and disastrous effort at wing-walking) and Hell's Angels (the romantically heroic final sequence of the gallant self-sacrifice of two aces). One can't really complain, as one could in Butch Cassidy, that serious perspectives are opened up only to be ignored; nor has one to mutter, as with The Sting, that the absence of any real content at all had to be papered over by decorative exotica from any number of ill-assorted periods. Here the marvellously rackety old monoplanes and biplanes, dispensing the heady aroma of speed and grace with a poetic sureness never even approached by the most streamlined jet, tell their own sad story of how the men who flew them, having once found a way out of the strait-laced paths of commercial flying by cheerfully daring death to conquer space, time and gravity with the air circuses, were once more forced down to earth and sobriety. Wisely the film rarely departs for too long from its aircraft, and benefits by ensuring … that they remain the stars in the limelight…. Some of the scenes are mordantly funny, like the rehearsal for the ladder-from-car-to-plane stunt, with Waldo crashing bodily into a shack which inconveniently materialises in the way; some are nakedly exciting, like Kessler's attempt to achieve ten successive loops, or Ezra's three doomed tries at the outside loop; and some are charged with enthralling balletic precision, like the final dogfight. Put together, they ensure that The Great Waldo Pepper is the least pretentious, most enjoyable of the three entries to date in this series.