Most audiences will be thoroughly sated from the wing-walking, midair transferring, outside-looping and tragic crack-ups to overlook its faults.

| Apr 24, 2025

Not only is this movie confined to men's interests and activities, but its slickness and superficiality make it a loss for most audiences.

| Mar 20, 2025

It is much lacking in narrative and character, and makes little of the period.

| Mar 20, 2025

Waldo Pepper has a big hole in the center.

| Mar 8, 2025

Trouble is that Producer-Director Hill provided a story... and a strangely dichotomous one it is.

| Mar 6, 2025

It never flies very high but always keeps its wings at least a smidgin above the treetops.

| Mar 3, 2025

Hill has tried to jam too much into one picture.

| Mar 3, 2025

One can't really complain, as one could in Butch Cassidy, that serious perspectives are opened up only to be ignored; nor has none to mutter, as with The Sting, that the absence of any real content at all had to be papered over by decorative exotica.

| Mar 3, 2025

The Great Waldo Pepper lifts off on what appears to be a flight of pure, light-hearted adventure and almost immediately runs into rough weather.

| Mar 3, 2025

Some critics have written off The Great Waldo Pepper as another exercise in nostalgia; but it has a poetic texture altogether richer than that.

| Mar 3, 2025

There is a lyrical feeling, a rhythm to the action shots which is quite apart and very much superior to Henry Mancini's score.

| Mar 3, 2025

While the acting is agreeable, it's the stunt flying coordinated by Frank Tallman and the photography directed by Robert Surtees that make this film thrilling.

| Mar 3, 2025

Hill relies too heavily on excitement in the air to compensate for the absence of excitement in the spirit of individual men.

| Mar 3, 2025

There is an inconsistency to the character of Redford that never lets him come close enough to the audience to be real. He is shallow and he is there, but he is difficult to empathize with.

| Mar 3, 2025

The script... is terribly flimsy and limps along in arid, corny, or mawkish stretches between aerial sequences.

| Mar 3, 2025

The themes never quite come off, but they add a fake solemnity that gives a vaguely spurious air to the whole movie.

| Mar 3, 2025

It's a good Robert Redford vehicle... and he measures up to the physical and emotional demands of the role.

| Original Score: B- | Mar 3, 2025

"The Great Waldo Pepper" is a wonderful bromide for the plastic chicken, paternalistic pilots and chemical toilets that are the sum of today's friendly skies.

| Mar 3, 2025

It starts out as a relaxed, summery little diversion, then quickly goes astray and finally diminishes into one of those lyrical innocence-is-dead to-dos that becomes a drag.

| Mar 3, 2025

The stunning aerial photography more than makes up for the uneven story and Robert Redford is routinely debonair as the glamorous aviator.

| Mar 3, 2025