Von Richthofen and Brown (1971)

                “Von Richthofen and Brown” was another recent participant in my Best Dogfighting Movie tournament.  It did surprisingly well for a movie that is not very well known.  It was Roger Corman’s  attempt to go beyond his B-movie / cult movie reputation.  He had a much bigger budget than for films like “Bloody Mama” and Gas-s-s-s”.  It was his second war movie after the classic “The Secret Invasion”.  Unfortunately, his experience in the filming of “Von Richthofen and Brown” resulted in his directing only two more films in the next 37 years.

                The recently arrived Von Richthofen (John Phillip Law) arrives at his squadron and has a rough landing.  He then proceeds to show his mindset by rushing to take a souvenir from his first kill.  He has trophies made for each subsequent victory.  Pilot obsessed with glory – check!  Von Richthofen meets the famous Oswald Boelcke who advises him to come from out of the sun, get in close, don’t waste ammunition, and only fight if you have an advantage.  Soon the Red Baron has ten kills and is fast becoming a celebrity.  Meanwhile, Roy Brown (Don Stroud) has arrived at his RAF squadron where he makes an immediate impression by refusing to join in a toast to Von Richthofen.  He does not believe in that chivalric bull shit.  He is a modern warrior.  “I’m just a technician, I change things.  Put a plane in front of me with a man in it – I change him into a wreck and a corpse.”  He is also a cynic.  When asked “who’s next?”, he responds “we’re all next”.  Somehow Brown bullies his way to leadership and has his squadron hunt in packs with a plane as bait.  These two main characters are bound to duel.  The Knight of the Air versus the Hunter of the Sky.

                The movie is a roller coaster ride of scenes that are either entertaining or farcical.  The entertaining ones include Von Richthofen’s  encounter with the British ace Hawker and the climactic duel with Brown.  In between we get the Red Baron crashing in no man’s land so we can get a small-scale fire fight and not one but two attacks on air fields.  This being a Roger Corman film, there is a truly ludicrous moment when Fokker shows off his new plane while a hottie caresses it and he speaks in sexual innuendo!  This is a fun movie if you are in the right mood.

                Corman made no claims to historical accuracy and it’s a good thing he didn’t.  In spite of that, there is a smidgen of accuracy to be found here.  The Red Baron did replace Boelcke, but did not contribute to his death.  He did shoot down Hawker, but not in spite of the Brit motioning that he was out of ammo.   He did collect silver cups and his combat tactics are pretty close to his philosophy.  The script inserts Herman Goring as the villainous counterpoint to Von Richthofen when actually he did not join the Flying Circus until after the Baron’s death.  At one point, Goring actually argues that it is okay to strafe nurses and even “gas them”!  On the other hand, the Brown character is almost totally fictional.  He was not in the RAF.  He was in the Royal Canadian Air Force.  Instead of being a jerk, he was a well-respected squadron commander who insisted his charges be well-trained before seeing combat.   As far as the final duel, the movie basically sticks to the official version that credits Brown with the death of the Red Baron.  Most authorities feel Von Richthofen was actually killed by a bullet from an Australian anti-aircraft gun.  It is not surprising that the movie does not show that version.

                It is hard to get a hold on this movie.  “Directed by Roger Corman” sends a signal that the movie should be inferior to most war movies.  However, VR&B is definitely not your typical Corman movie.  It was a labor of love for him and he went all out on it with a much larger budget than he had ever had before.  This started with the purchasing of most of the aircraft used in “The Blue Max”.  VR&B used twelve planes including replica Pfalz DIIIs,  S.E. 5s, Fokker D.VIIs, and Fokker Dr.Is.  It’s a very nice line-up for a glorified B-movie like this.  The planes do not just sit at the airfield.  The movie has a large amount of dogfighting in it – 24 minutes.  That quantity is the most of any of the sixteen movies in the dogfighting tournament.  The quality is fairly high.  There are fine acrobatics by the stunt pilots, one of whom was killed.  Stroud and Law learned the rudiments of flying and they were filmed in the back seats as though flying.  Unfortunately, although the cinematography is well done, it is repetitive.  We get a lot of pilot’s faces, guns firing, and the use of smoke trails to indicate a plane has lost the battle.

                While the film deserves an A for effort and a B for dogfighting, it is inferior in all other areas.  The acting is wooden from the B-list cast.  Law was a poor choice for Von Richthofen, but Stroud does bring charisma to his role.  Still, we are talking about Don Stroud here.  The actors are not helped by the dialogue which is stilted and pious.  They are also placed in some ridiculous scenarios like the German attack on the British airfield while they are celebrating their attack on the German air field.  It does result in numerous cool explosions (from fighter planes bereft of bombs). 

                Does it crack the 100 Best War Movies of all time?  No way, but it is a nice time waster if you don’t invest any brain cells in it.  Make sure you do not watch it to get the true story of the death of the Red Baron.

GRADE =  C+

The Red Baron (2008)

                “The Red Baron” ("Der rote Baron") is a biopic about the most famous fighter pilot is history.  It was written and directed by Nikolai Mullerschon.  The movie was filmed in the Czech Republic, France, and Germany.  The decision was made to use English for the dialogue.  It was very expensive, but was a terrible flop at the box office.  Apparently German audiences were not interested in a movie that glorified a war hero, even if he fought in the less evil of the world wars.

                The movie opens with the tired trope of the boy seeing a plane and dreaming of flying.  Ten years later that boy is now a pilot in Northern France in 1916.  Lt. Manfred von Richthofen (Mathias Schwieghofer) drops a wreath honoring a fallen foe with amazing accuracy into the grave itself.  The Red Baron should have been a bombardier!  The first dogfight comes only five minutes into the movie.  The Red Baron shoots down an S.E. 5 and then goes to the crash site where he helps get medical care for the downed pilot Roy Brown (Joseph Fiennes).  They both meet a comely nurse named Kate (Lena Headey).  Love triangle alert!

 

                Every hero needs a villain and the Red Baron gets his in a British ace named Hawker.  The torch is passed when Richthofen shoots down Hawker.  This is one factor in the Red Baron being awarded Le Pour L’Merite (“ the Blue Max”) and command of the famous Flying Circus.  Higher command, including the Kaiser, wants to make Richthofen into a celebrity for morale purposes.  He is uncomfortable with this and his pacifist beliefs do not jibe with his superiors’ win at all costs attitude.

  His squadron is a small unit featuring a variety of characters including his brother Lothar.  Lothar is younger and more aggressive than Manfred.  They disagree on tactics and philosophy.  Manfred counsels his men to target the enemy planes, not the pilots. One of his men is the famous Werner Voss (Til Schweiger) who acts as a cynical counterpoint to the Red Barons chivalric nature.  He is also something of a friendly competitor.  Voss is a fascinating character, but he does not get the screen time of Kate and Brown.  They keep showing up.  Richthofen shoots Brown down (again) and they meet in no man’s land for some manly bonding.  It’s Brown’s turn next time and Manfred ends up in the hospital where he is able to renew his tense relationship with the snippy Kate.  In real life these two would never get together, but this is a movie so …  Will he choose her and a promotion to head of the Imperial German Air Service over continuing to lead his men into battle?  Which choice is most likely to lead to a climactic duel with Brown?

Von Richthofen and Brown - the revisionist version

The obvious question is how accurate the film is.  The answer is not much.  You don’t have to know much about von Richthofen to guess that large parts of it are bull shit.  It begins immediately with the young baron seeing a monoplane before they would have existed in Germany.  The real Red Baron may have dreamed of flying, but when he entered the military he volunteered for the cavalry.  He only switched to the air service after his unit was dismounted and given boring tasks.  Before he ended up in Northern France to start his rise to fame, he was a back-seater on an observation plane on the Eastern Front.   A chance encounter with the famous ace Oswald Boelcke got him into fighter training.  The movie’s early lead-up to his command of Jagdstaffel 2 is fairly accurate.  He did shoot down Hawker, win the Blue Max, and get command of the squadron after Boelcke’s death.  He did have his plane painted red, but the movie’s implication that he did it to scare the enemy seems farfetched.  Manfred does suffer a bad head wound and undoubtedly did meet at least one nurse during his convalescence, but there was no romance with a nurse named Kate.  Needless to say he also did not have an ongoing bromance with Roy Brown.  They only met once and it was very briefly.  That one brief encounter was the day the Baron died.  Boringly the movie decides to do that famous encounter off camera.  The final scene implies the legend that Brown shot down Richthofen.  For a movie that showed no compunction in violating the truth, it is puzzling why they did not recreate the refuted, but official version of the death.  Most experts feel that the incident did involve Brown coming to the rescue of a friend, but his stay on the Red Baron’s tail was brief and very unlikely to have resulted in the single bullet that killed Manfred.  Most likely the .303 bullet came from an anti-aircraft gun.  How boring!

The biggest faux pas of the movie is the way the Red Baron’s character and philosophy are depicted.  The movie gets this almost completely wrong.  Although he was a cautious pilot, he was not cynical about the war and it is very doubtful that he mouthed off to his superiors.  He also did not avoid targeting enemy pilots.  Quite the contrary, he urged his men to aim at the pilot.  The real Red Baron was primarily a hunter who was driven to accumulate victories.  (The movie conveniently leaves out his famous commissioning of silver trophies for each win.)  His cold personality is realistic, but then the movie undercuts this with the sappy romance which was totally out of character.

“The Red Baron” is competently made.  The acting is average.  Schweighofer was apparently cast mainly for his boyish good looks, not his acting chops.  Headey seems to have wandered into the movie.  There is little chemistry between the two and the romance is forced and implausible.  Of the supporting cast only Schweiger makes an impression as Voss.  He has the charisma Schweighofer lacks.  Fiennes participation feels like they decided they needed a name actor.  He seems bored with the role.  Perhaps he was unmotivated due to the shameful shoehorning of his character into the script.  It is just one of many unrealistic elements in the film.

"Don't fret, Kate.  Few women can compete
with my beauty."

The action is the only thing to recommend the movie for war movie fans.  The CGI is acceptable and better than in “Flyboys”.  The cinematographer sticks to the usual frontal cockpit shots intercut with machine guns firing.  There are eight dogfighting scenes and there is some attempt to have some variety.  This can result in some silliness like a cool, but ridiculous night dogfight.  One nice result from the campy multi-coloring of the Flying Circus planes is this is one dogfighting film where you can follow the various characters.  The movie does not avoid the clichés common in this subgenre.  The young boy sees a plane and dreams, the villainous foe,  the hero loses his best friend(s) and becomes increasingly disillusioned, the air field is attacked, romance with a local girl but bros before hos, missing lucky charm = death, WWI pilots live in a chateau.  And we get the trip to the trenches to remind us how dirty war actually is.

Actual gun camera footage from WWI

How this movie was green-lighted is perplexing.  In an age where anti-heroes are de rigueur, “The Red Baron” looks like it should be playing on a double bill with “To Hell and Back”.  But then again, portraying von Richthofen realistically as a jerk probably would have been just as box office blah.  What the Hell, just watch it because it’s pretty entertaining.  Your girlfriend will enjoy it and you can feel superior as you snort at the silliness.

GRADE =  C