Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton

The Great Waldo Pepper

2 7 7 O ne wouldn’t have gathered from the way in which the film was discussed when it appeared that ἀ e Great Waldo Pepper (1975) amounted to much more than “the same kind of thing”that had been offered already by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and ἀ e Sting (1973).Both its predecessors achieved an enormous popular success, which was sustained on their re‑release, as well as satisfied the unexacting demands of crit‑ ics who really despise commercial movies but are ready, in moods of relaxation, to jovially succumb to the kind of opportunistic fluency which makes no bones about its calculation. ἀ e Great Waldo Pepper, however, failed dismally at the box office and failed to come up with the invitations to have knowing fun which excite journalistic approval. Both facts bear elo‑ quent testimony to the significant differences between George Roy Hill’s third film with Robert Redford and its forbears—differences which primarily have to do with the attitude we are to adopt toward the hero. In Hermes the ἀ ief,Norman O.Brown gives an account of the mythological archetype of the tricksters: Hermes and Mercury in Greek and Roman legend, Coyote in North American Indian tales, Loki and Puck in Norse and English folklore, respectively, are all avatars of this type, and Herman Melville’s ἀ e Confidence-Man represents its most complex and sophisti‑ cated literary deployment. Depending on the historical circumstances, the trickster may evolve into any one of such contrasting figures as a benevolent culture‑hero nearly indistinguishable from the Supreme God, a demiurge in strong opposition to the heavenly powers, a kind of devil counteracting the creator in every possible way, a messenger and mediator between gods and men, or merely a Puckish figure, the hero of comical stories. (Brown, 46) The “theft” with which Hermes is associated is distinguished from “robbery” and from the physical prowess of the robber‑hero Herakles by connotations of fraud, stealth, and deceit, which give evidence of magical powers and which manifest themselves in many ways besides stealing. Thus, Hermes is variously the patron of sexual seduction, the master of runes and tal‑ ismanic formulas,and the sorcerer.While the trickster becomes purely evil when incorporated, as the devil,in Christian myth (while retaining,of course,his alluring and charismatic quality), his pre‑Christian forms combine positive and negative characteristics: destructive guile coex‑ ists with the properties of culture‑hero and“giver of good things.” The Great Waldo Pepper (1981) 16 Chapter 16.indd 277 1/17/12 10:51 AM 2 7 8 pa r t t w o : h o l l y w o o d m o v i e s Melville’s novel is set onApril first aboard a ship of fools called,ironically,the Fidele,which functions as a microcosm of American society, and the myth provides the basis for a critique of the structures of ideological confidence which sustain white American democracy: the succes‑ sive avatars of the trickster appeal for confidence and,in betraying it,demonstrate the mystified nature of the values they have pretended to uphold. This use of the myth is a recurrent motif in theAmerican Gothic; it is central to the work of Mark Twain,appears again in Jack Kerouac and Thomas Pynchon,and defines the hero function in Clint Eastwood’s western High Plains Drifter (1973), whose protagonist, like Melville’s confidence man, is at once Devil and Nemesis. The assimilation of the trickster to the asocial homoerotic couple is not without prec‑ edent (Huck Finn serves very radically as a critical trickster figure), but in Butch Cassidy and ἀ e Sting, the conjunction is simply at the service of an appeal to romantic identification with the male outlaw. In Waldo Pepper, the male romance, while thematically crucial, is both radi‑ cally redefined and displaced from the center of the narrative. The concern here is with a hero whose appearance as the hero itself is an act of trickery; the film is single‑mindedly preoc‑ cupied with the ideological determinants of his masquerade and, inseparably, the emotional needs it fulfills. Waldo Pepper (Robert Redford) is the trickster‑god who comes “down from the heavens—all for you,”and whose plane,the“Mercury,”bears the winged helmet as insignia; his potency, however, derives not from his own magical properties but from social readings of him (including his own) which come to seem increasingly problematic as the film goes on. It is crucial for...