The screenplay was written by Alvin Sargent, adapting Remarque's posthumously resonant source material — Remarque had been exploring themes of love under the shadow of death throughout his literary career. Sydney Pollack, coming off the success of Three Days of the Condor (1975), chose the film as a European-set prestige drama, an ambition that critics later held against it.
Al Pacino received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama for his performance. Marthe Keller played opposite him as the terminally ill Lillian Morelli.
Formula One driver Bobby Deerfield is a calculating, control-obsessed loner who has built an identity around the discipline and cold logic required to win races. When he witnesses a fiery crash that kills a teammate and seriously injures a competitor, he becomes unsettled by the proximity of death in a sport he has always kept at an emotional remove. While visiting the injured survivor, he encounters Lillian Morelli — an impulsive, unconventional woman who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness and who faces her situation with a freedom and openness that stands in contrast to his rigidity. Her influence draws him into an emotional engagement with life that his racing career had effectively suppressed.
The production secured extraordinary access to the 1976 Formula One season, with race footage filmed on location by cinematographers embedded in the paddock and at circuits during live championship rounds. The footage features identifiable appearances by drivers active during that season, including Carlos Pace, Tom Pryce, James Hunt, Patrick Depailler, and Mario Andretti. This material lends the film a documentary texture that distinguishes its racing sequences from the staged or studio-bound imagery typical of motorsport dramas of the era.
Critical and commercial reception was largely negative. The film holds a 29% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 14 reviews. Critics described Bobby Deerfield as an over-long melodrama with a plodding storyline, and audiences reportedly laughed at scenes designed to be dramatic. Racing audiences who had responded to the action-centred motorsport films Grand Prix (1966) and Le Mans (1971) were disappointed that the narrative spent comparatively little time on track. Vincent Canby of The New York Times characterised it as "the year's most cynical movie made by people who know better, including Sydney Pollack, the director, and Alvin Sargent, who wrote the screenplay." Time Out described it as "a classic example of a Hollywood director being struck down by a lethal 'art' attack as soon as he sets foot in Europe."
The film grossed approximately $9.3 million in the United States against a production budget of $5.6 million, making it a financial loss.
Bobby Deerfield was released on VHS in the United States on at least two occasions during the 1980s, with documented releases around 1984 and 1990, and a further listing for 1994 distributed by Warner Home Video. A DVD edition followed in March 2008 from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. In September 2016 Twilight Time issued a limited Blu-ray edition of 3,000 copies, featuring DTS high-definition audio options, an isolated score, and a booklet.
Despite its critical failure, Bobby Deerfield occupies a minor but genuine place in the intersection of cinema and Formula One. The documentary-quality footage of the 1976 season — one of the most dramatic in Formula One history, immediately following Niki Lauda's accident at the Nurburgring — gives the film lasting archival value for motorsport historians, even if its romantic drama failed to engage contemporary audiences.