The Great Waldo Pepper

Saw The Great Waldo Pepper (thanks, Paul!) It was essentially a show-biz film, the show in this case being biplane acrobatics. The protagonist is a World-War-1-era flying instructor who was cheated of his chance to fight and, in his mind, show what he could really do. He spends his time risking his life for the entertainment of small-town hicks and recounting famous war-stories as though they were his own. He is a man consumed by the dream of being the greatest pilot in the world. This dream costs him dearly, however, as disaster after disaster strikes, rendering him plane-less, friend-less, licence-less. He has the misfortune of being alive at the exact moment that "flyer" was becoming an occupation like "driver." (There's a touch of 70s-era individualism in the film, particularly in the scene where The Man is demanding that he have a piece of paper to do what he's been doing for years. "Are you gonna license the rain and the clouds?" he demands. Man the beautiful animal rears his head.)

Anyway, this film is mainly about the power of dreams to transcend and uplift. As one character points out, they are all lies anyway, but they are beautiful lies and perhaps even lies which become truths merely through faith and belief. It's like a kind of religion. The flying ace has never proven his worth and may even suspect, in his darker moments, that there may be no worth there after all. His dream of somehow showing, perhaps even just to himself, that he's the best at flying, gives him purpose even as it strips his life away. It's never put in terms quite this stark by the film, but his madness keeps him sane.

The plot of the film and attendant mindset is the focus here. This is a fairly accessible and crowd-pleasing film, but it's fundamentally philosophical in tone. The characters are realistic but not the focus, neither is the camera-work, nor the visuals in general. The film's venerating depiction of the protagonist's quest is very 70s-ish and very seductive. I'm personally more of a dream-rejecter by nature and thus the protagonist's sacrifice of conventional comfort for unconventional satisfaction seems silly to me. But even I have to admit, the film succeeds in putting this idea in a noble and beautiful light. Perhaps there is worth in dreaming the impossible dream. Dulce et decorum est, perhaps.