Meade escapes the manhunt using a Jeep that he had previously hidden in the forest and concealing the money that he has stolen in the carcass of a deer.

At the aircraft boneyard near Tucson, Arizona, the Meades acquire a hot-air balloon, but Gruen steals the money from Hannah.

Along with clues that he had left, the previous encounters between the two men in the army had convinced Gruen that only Meade could have managed the audacious hijacking.

Spottiswoode argued that the film was "doomed" unless he could shoot new sequences, to be written by Ron Shelton, who would be credited as an associate producer.

[5] According to one writer, the new team "added new characters - a rural rogue's gallery of scam artists - and an end-of-the-hippie era feeling.

"[5] The Kulik film was a "banal, dour Vietnam vet docudrama" in which Meade concocts the scheme to escape postwar malaise and becomes upset when he wins the acclaim as a hijacker that had eluded him as a veteran.

[1] To generate publicity for the film, Universal Pictures offered a million-dollar reward for any information that would lead to the capture and arrest of the real D.B.

Painted in the fictitious Northern Pacific company livery, it appears in the first scene, photographed by pilot Clay Lacy from his Learjet.

[9] In a critical review of the film, Vincent Canby of The New York Times noted that "... a number of excellent actors (were coerced) into performing what is a dismally unfunny chase-comedy that eventually seems as aimless, shortsighted and cheerlessly cute as the character they've made up and called 'D.B.

"[11] Roger Spottiswoode won the Special Jury Prize at the 1982 Cognac Festival du Film Policier.