[One] cannot begin to talk about "The Great Waldo Pepper" without dragging in the previous outings of George Roy Hill (directorial analysis), Robert Redford (star iconography), male-oriented movies (feminist sociology), airplane movies (genre analysis), and for Richard Corliss perhaps even a study of William Goldman's screenwriting stylistics, not to mention Henry Mancini's rainbowish melodies, and the sterling cinematography of Robert Surtees. After all this and more, it is not hard to see why some critics seem to be playing three-dimensional chess while their readers are still engrossed in checkers.

What to do? Nothing really…. It is too early … for me to make a final judgment on George Roy Hill when I am still in the process of reevaluating [William] Wellman and [John] Huston and [Stanley] Kubrick and [William] Wyler.

Still, I must admit that "The Great Waldo Pepper" struck me as a somewhat better movie than I had...