Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [133]
Though the story was set in Nebraska, the Texas locations Hill chose, partly for sentimental reasons, around Elgin, Floresville and Lockhart were areas he knew well from his postwar flying, with second unit shooting in Florida and California. The choice of locations was further dictated by the winter sky profile: the kind of cumulus cloud cover so typical of Texas in February would enhance the illusion of death-defying speed in the many biplane flight sequences.
As Waldo, Redford portrays a gutsy individualist in the style of Charles Lindbergh, determined to live out his dream, which is to capture the kind of glory given to World War I pilots. Along the way he is demeaned—he even appears briefly in drag for a flying circus—but his goal is to be a real hero, unlike the silver screen Valentino whom Mary Beth so adores. The opportunity for undisputed greatness comes in attempting the allegedly impossible outside loop. He tries but is beaten to his goal by Kessler, the German ace glamour boy, and only settles the score by joining the Hollywood dream factory, where he finds employment as a stunt pilot in a war movie. Here, in a last-reel twist, he eventually outmaneuvers Kessler in a mock dogfight and wins the kudos.
Bob Crawford saw the venture as a home movie for Hill. “He had such fun doing it. He flew planes on location and directed scenes with the actor in the seat behind him. Most of the derring-do was either something he’d already flown or something he dreamed about. He’d done it all himself already. He’d crashed planes. He’d won races. Bob got to live out the bits in between.”
Most famous of those bits was the wing walking, with minimal harnesses, at three thousand feet. Redford found this exhilarating. “I’m not sure what the insurance connotation was, but George wouldn’t have cared. He would have lied to them. Risk came easy to him, as it did to me. It was scary, but I liked it.” Bo Svenson did not. He refused to participate and was, accordingly, suspended by Hill, with the threat of dismissal. Svenson sued immediately, stating Hill’s objectives put his life in peril. “I made a mistake in casting based on image,” said Hill. “What I should have done was take each of them up in a barnstormer, done some loops and set them down, then said, ‘Okay, now you fly it.’ It wasn’t a movie for blue screen [studio back-projected images]. It always lived and breathed for me as the real thing. And I loved how Redford served that.”
Redford, however, never felt it was important work. He sensed it would not do well. In the end, the script downed the movie. In the story, Waldo’s relationship with Mary Beth is carefully graphed in the first act and a half. Dialogue and wit are sharp, and Mary Beth emerges as a lovable, if overpossessive, supporter of Waldo’s. “But then bang in the middle of the second act, she’s inveigled into wing walking and she’s killed. It was a disaster. We killed the movie there and then,” said Hill. “If we’d cast Jack Nicholson, the audience would have accepted that level of despair and darkness. But Bob had taken on the role as our national glamour king. He was the sunny good-luck guy—even when he was playing a bandit—and the audience expected light around him. Dramatically, the decision to kill Mary Beth in itself wasn’t bad. But in a Redford movie, in the vicarious way women were relating to him after The Way We Were, we were doomed because we were effectively killing them off. I recognized that problem only in the editing, but by then it was too late to fix.”
Though the movie generated $20 million in receipts, its reception in the spring of 1975 was bleak, with Robert Lindsey in The New York Times pronouncing it a dud.