We know that George Roy Hill has a versatile directorial range: Toys in the Attic, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting have been richly varied. So maybe the news that in his personal life he has been hooked since childhood on aerobatics, and that he has been not only a wartime pilot but a peacetime barnstormer, ought not to come as a surprise. Yet somehow it does. And so does his latest film [The Great Waldo Pepper], which has obviously been made with true affection and pays tribute to the idols of his youth, as well as to such venerable aviation films as Wings (William Wellman, 1927) and Hell's Angels (Howard Hughes, 1930). Solemnly and quaintly, the little white monoplane circles the globe in the oldest of the Universal trade marks—and we're off on a spree where process trickery is eschewed and stunt...