Movie review - The Blue Max by John Guillermin (1966)

The Blue Max, 1966, John Guillermin

(based on the novel by Jack D. Hunter)

It's hard to write about this movie as a strictly WW1 movie, so I had to divide my review into two parts:

Story/Plot:

A romance put into the reality of the Great War. We have there an old general with a beautiful wife, a young pilot angry for glory and this is enough to make the things complicated. Certainly she is a femme fatale and this means you cannot refuse her wishes. If you did so, your hours are counted. No one wins, in the end.

There is a suitor you have to compete with. And a bottle of champagne to be opened each 15 minutes.

The background of this story is a desire of young, poor German soldier (starting from the mere infantry corporal) to achieve the status of the hero. He wants to be famous, to be admired, and - as this is his goal with the highest priority - to get "the Blue Max" (Pour le Merite - the highest German decoration for bravery). He is ready to do everything to achieve his goal - including cheating, throwing his friends to the wolves, and killing with no mercy... There is nothing more important that this small blue cross.

The World War I in the movie vs the reality:

I could write a story about it, but just briefly the main comments.

What is this stupid lever used by the German pilots to fire the machine guns? None of the German planes had something alike - the guns were fired by the controls mounted at the main control stick.

The second half of the movie is based on "the last German offensive" on the Western Front, meaning the Ludendorff Offensive that was released in March 1918. The problem is that the countryside looks like in the middle of the summer (or even autumn - look at the trees during the scene with passing below the bridge).

The main character - Stachel - saves Richthofen's life, and then he was shot down and landed in the ripe crop. Richthofen was shot down and died in April 1918, so he couldn't fly in the summer/autumn of 1918.

After saving Richthofen's life, the main character was asked to join Richthofen's Flying Circus - this was Jasta 11. But in the movie Stachel is in Jasta 11 from the very beginning. It's crazy.

All-lozenge Fokker Dreidecker. Have you seen something like this before?

At the end of the movie Stachel comes to Berlin. The buildings showed in those scenes are typical English style ones - so probably the scene was filmed in GB or Ireland. Not a German city, for sure.

There is a ground attack of Spring Offensive 1918 shown in the movie. It could be anything but not the infantry attack of German Sturmtruppen in 1918. The real fighting in the trenches was far away from the scenes shown in the movie.

Fokker D. VII and Pfaltz D.III carrying bombs and bombing the trenches.

In the final scene - "the new German plane" is a Morane-Saulnier from 30s. Much too advanced to be produced at the end of the Great War.

"Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles" became the German anthem in 1922.

And many, many more... It's a pity that again the director and his staff didn't care about the reality at all. Just a little effort was enough to make this movie much better. Following the reality of the Great War would make the plot more interesting.

Resume:

I'm not sure if I should recommend this movie. The romancing plot is weak, there is no WW1 reality in it. And the main, however interesting, story about the man desiring to get the Blue Max is not enough to blot the defects out.

And it is definitely too long - 2,5 hrs. is a long time. This story could be told in more interesting way in 1 - 1,5 hr.

And if you think you can enjoy Ursula Andress acting in this movie you'd be disappointed - she was dubbed by Nikki Van der Zyl.
(JD)

Movie review - Flyboys by Tony Bill (2006)

Flyboys by Tony Bill (2006)

I was thinking about this review for the long time because I wasn’t sure what to write… If I could describe it with just one line, the result would be – a complete disaster, one of the worst WW1 movies I’ve ever seen.

The movie had two main plots – one is the story of the Lafayette Escadrille in France, the second on is the romantic plot telling us the love story in the war time. Well, I think I’m not enough familiar with movie love stories to write the review about the second plot, so this review would be focused on Lafayette Escadrille only.

The budget of this movie was 60.000.000 USD (compare to 18.000.000 USD spent on Red Baron in 2008) and in the result we’ve received a movie that is telling us everything but not the reality of the Great War. I really do not understand why this is a problem to hire someone with average knowledge of WW1 aviation and reality? Just the average, we’re not expecting the miracles…

I have the conclusion that the director and screenplay writer had confused the Great War with WW2. The German fighter plane attacking the column of French war refugees… the bomb raid over Paris, with close escort of fighters… all this looks like the scenes of the WW2 but just the old equipment. And again, the sky is full of Dreideckers as the only German plane. Maybe it looks great in the movie, but in the real world only ca. 320 of them were built (compare to 1700 Fokkers D.VII or 2500 Albatroses D.V). The aerobatics shown in the movie is great, but no WW1 plane could stand it. 

The sky is full of all-red Fokker Dreideckers...

The list of factual and other mistakes is very long, but just some examples: there were no Zeppelin air raids with close escort of dozens of fighters, there were no Zeppelin raids on Paris, the range of WW1 fighter was not enough to fly from the front line to Paris and back for the escort purposes, there were no Dreideckers in 1916, the marking and cammo of the plane is wrong… Enough?

Some of the scenes are really with no common sense, as the example the one when Blaine takes off after rescuing Lucienne, he killed the German soldier firing at him and kneeling. Could anyone explain how the machine gun mounted over the engine of the taking off plane is possible to fire at the man kneeling in front of it? 

 The Great War or Star Wars?

The characters in the movie are fictional; however the producers have claimed they were based on real persons. It’s hard to believe in it as the characters shown are just flat stereotypes. Just take the planes away, move them from France to the Wild West and as the result you would have a „B“ class western story. Additionally this movie is full of social clichés and sometimes I had the feeling that the romantic story is the main one and the war is only the background. And it’s really too long, not exciting at all. 

Is there a war outside?

If you want to get to know anything about the WW1, Lafayette Escadrille and aviation – look for another movie. If you want to see a tragic love story with the war in the background – spend your time with „Gone with the Wind“.

Do not waste your time with „Flyboys“.

And as the final conclusion – the rotary engine is called „rotary“ because… yes, because it is rotating. How surprising, isn’t it?
(JD)

Movie review - The Dawn Patrol (1938)

The Dawn Patrol by Edmund Goulding, 1938

The movie is a remake of The Dawn Patrol from 1930 (with Douglas Fairbanks), but most of the aerial scenes from the original one were used in it. This is another movie without the computer generated scenes and without FX tricks. The camera seems to be relatively slow, according to the current standards, so some scenes may look not realistic. But we should not forget that the movie was made 73 years ago and we cannot compare it to the modern ones. I was surprised that the copy had a very good quality, didn’t look as it is more than 70 years old.

The plot is not complicate. It is 1915 at the remote RFC airfield in France. We can see the hard daily routine of the fighter pilots as the main frame of the movie. And the time is really hard – 1915 was the time of Fokker Scourge, so Germans are the power of the sky. We can see the squadron commander, Major Brand (Rathbone) who is in the quandary – the high command is sending order by order, forcing him to send all the possible pilots to the sky. But most of them are just the greenhorns after the pilot school and their virgin sortie is mostly their very last one… Two of the most experienced pilots in the squadron – Captain Courtney (Flynn) and Lieutenant Scott (Niven) are arguing with him all the time, as they are trying to give the young pilots the chance to learn how to fly the combat missions. Brand agrees with them, but he cannot show them his real feelings – he has to act as the squadron commander and obeying the orders. ‘This is a slaughterhouse. And I’m the butcher’, he said once in anger.

The high casualty ratio brought the pilots to the kind of doomed fatalism we know very well from the memoirs wrote by pilots of both world wars. When coming back there is nothing best to do than drink too much and play the crazy. This is much better than thinking and remembering the friends who died. One of the best scenes showing the reality of those days is when Courtney, a Flight A leader, is erasing from the blackboard the names of two pilots who died in combat. Then he wrote the names of two rookies in this place just to erase them the next morning…

The turning point of the movie is when Courtney is promoted to be a squadron commander, replacing Brand in his duties. Now he realizes that this is not as easy as he thought before. Especially that there is Scott’s baby brother among the latest replacement…

This is all regarding the plot – I would not like to spoil the pleasure of watching this movie by telling the story to the end.

And now a few lines about the technical part and the reality of the Great War in the movie.

First of all – it’s 1915 and we have RFC with Nieuports 24 (first flight in 1917) and German with Fokkers D.VII. This is far away from the reality, but I can understand that the producers wanted to show us the hard times of Fokker Scourge era. On the other side – they are REAL. Yes, a real Nieuports 24, with the rotary engine that is rotating! And this is a strong point of the move.

A weak point is that those Nieuports have three machine guns (two mounted over the engine and one over the upper wing) – real British Nieuports had only one machine gun, over the wing with Foster mounting. The bombs are another one – Nieuport could carry only the small bombs (25kg?) but we can see that a single plane with six of them could do the same damage as B-17…

I hope that the producers wanted to show in this way, that the airplane was a lethal weapon. Especially for the public that had no idea about the WW1 reality.

Some of the aerial scenes (and the crazy motorcycle ride) were taken in the studio, with the background scenes behind the acting actors taken previously as a separate image. Well, this is the reality of the 30s – there were no computers with ‘blue box’ available there. The marking of the planes and the characters are all fictitious (e.g. German fighter von Richter – as the equivalent of von Richthofen), it has no influence to the story itself, as the movie was made to show the mood of those dark days.

In the end I would like to recommend this movie and rate it as really a very good one. The plot is realistic, the actors are really excellent in their roles, and we can see some good aerial scenes. When I was looking for some information about this movie, I’ve found an opinion: ‘I’ve seen Pearl Harbour, but this movie is more exciting’. A good point!

‘Gentlemen, keep the war going please. We're going to roll in a few gutters.’ – Courtney.

(JD)