Whatever subject matter he happens to get his cinematic mitts on, whether he is Director or Producer, Roger Corman transforms it into his own B-movie interpretation, the scripts for his films are more like charismatic cliff’s notes. He is strictly here to provide you with ocular Meat and Potatoes, there is no need nor time in a Roger Corman film for introspective soul searching. Although I have always been a fan of his pulpy yet informative “St Valentine’s Day Massacre”, which I viewed on a murky Thanksgiving Day in 1975 on local TV channel WDCA-20 when I was recovering from the Chicken Pox at age Seven, I find the 1967 crime melodrama to be Corman’s most coherent and accessible of his films as well. Everything else I have seen from him is irreverent, but it harkens to so many well placed cliches of classic and certainly classic B-movie making. Corman makes films like he is a fan and auteur of tacky obvious cinema. Corman’s films are so telegraphed, they become more about the imagery and creativity, you recall shots and moments from Corman-directed films, like single frames from a comic book. You don’t recall plot after seeing a Corman film, that shit was superfluous.
When I read that Corman had directed a World War I Airplane dogfight movie, my interest was piqued, especially when I learned that it was released in the Summer of 1971, ’71 in my humble opinion being the greatest year in English and American cinema. The description of this film mentioned that it was a Hollywood-ized retelling of the real-life rivalry and air duel between two of World War I’s greatest flying aces, those aces being Canadian-born Roy Brown of the Royal Air Force and the Baron Von Richtofen, well-known German War Hero pilot who had earned the nickname “The Red Baron”.
While digging through information about the making of this film, I discovered it was made for less than a Million dollars, and that actor Don Stroud (who plays Brown in the film) once claimed in an interview that four people died on the set of the movie, and he and a stunt pilot were involved in a mishap that could potentially have made them corpses 5 and 6. Stroud, as you may recall, was quite compelling as the Drumming member of Buddy Holly’s back -up band, the Crickets, in 1978’s “The Buddy Holly Story”. The 1971 Roger Corman-directed film, “Von Richtofen and Brown” is beautiful to look at, it has the viewer thinking at all times how did they pull off all those stunts involving small antique-looking aircraft, and this film is another in a long list of films where people actually died making a Hollywood movie, an industry which in 1970, had very little oversight, especially when most of this film was filmed on location in Ireland at an airfield.
The 1966 World War I film “The Blue Max” had been filmed at the same airfield in Ireland, the Weston Aerodome near Dublin. The aerial cinematography for “Von Richtofen and Brown” is spectacular, though quite a few shots are repeated and the viewer is put through so many aerial dogfights in this movie that seem to transpire in identical manners. With Irish farmland down far below doubling as the French countryside, the look of this film is quite authentic. When characters, such as Airman Brown, go for walks in the fictitious countryside, the houses and manors that he comes upon appear extremely convincing, the look says confidently that we have been teleported back to the days of the “Great War”, the skies are always gray and the ground is always muddy.
American actor John Phillip Law, all 6’5″ of him, does a solid job as the real-life 5’8″ Baron. It would stand to reason that due to the size of the World War One airplane cockpits, that shorter Men would fare better as fighter pilots, for starters they would be smaller targets. Since everyone flew in open-air planes, there were no closed cockpits in those days, that must’ve been some cold temps up there. Law gives a stoic and measured performance as the Baron, who in real life is believed to have shot down 80 Allied planes, an amazing feat. Corman’s portrayal of the rival Air bases of the German and British armies seems more akin to rival fraternities than war. The movie’s narrative hangs out with the Germans at times, speaking what sounds initially like unintelligible gibberish in big smoky halls with the film cherry-picking Historical facts. I did not know that future sinister Nazi figure Herman Goring (played in this film by Barry Primus) had been a World War One pilot and had flown alongside the Red Baron in the infamous “Flying Circus”.
Veteran Movie Composer Hugo Friedhofer delivers a spectacular score for this film, the score along with the aerial footage transcends this film from classroom exercise to an entertainment worthy of patrons coughing up two bucks to see it, or whatever ticket prices were in them days. Friedhofer is probably best known for Musical scores he penned in the 1950’s and 1960’s, such as “The Bravados” with Gregory Peck and “The Young Lions” with Marlon Brando (two films I will probably address in future blogs). A composer with a thorough Orchestral voice, Friedhofer’s music fits perfectly in this film, which mixes a throwback tone with the modern audience threshold for violence. Friedhofer’s music for this film is gallant, exhilarating, gloomy, it provides varying winds of momentum for the events in this film’s chronology, which seems to be a mixture of Historical fact with occasional metaphors.
For instance, in one passage of the movie, we are privy to a formal ball/party that the Germans are throwing in which we meet the alluring singer/girlfriend of the Baron, Ilse (played by Karen Huston) and that the Baron consorts with the maker of the Fokker Airplane (Hurd Hatfield as Anthony Fokker). In the scene in question, the Baron and Fokker hang out and talk shop in an adjacent airplane hangar. Fokker unveils a new plane he has created for the Baron, the three-leveled tri plane of Red Baron legend. While the Baron and Fokker go into dorky detail about the plane’s intricacies, Ilse slithers around the plane like the sexiest low-brow car commercial I have yet to witness, an extremely tongue-in-cheek sequence, a subsequent sex scene between Law and Huston was supposedly cut due to test audiences’ heckling at the foray. Corman can’t help himself but be a smart-ass, it’s in his genetic makeup as an artist. Any accurate Historical content for this film seems to be purely and simultaneously coincidental and incidental.
Devotees of Roger Corman Directed and Produced films know that these films tend to have their own atmosphere, that there is very little introspection and typically an abundance of urgent visceral action. Roger Corman’s films stay in a sort of cinematic limbic system, there isn’t much time one spends during the viewing of a Corman film visiting the analytical section of their brain. That said, the apparent authenticity of the film in terms of it’s look is spot on. The costumes, the sets, the locales, even the rural Irish backdrop that was being reused from “The Blue Max” just fit perfectly, with additional apt looking rustic sites nearby.
When casting the part of the Red Baron initially, Corman thought like ever the showman, so the story goes. His initial hope in 1970 was to cast young sought-after actor Helmut Berger, the actor being a hot property foremost for his work recently at the time in “The Damned”(1969) and “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (1971). Corman’s thinking was that Berger would have looked and sounded authentic, and Berger’s anticipated casting would have meant the film would have been a big draw in Germany in addition to the United States and Great Britain. The idea to give the German troops such a heavy accent early on in the film makes the scenes almost undecipherable except for the physical actions. Whether they are enunciating fluent faux Bavarian or grunting, we get das gist. Whereas “The Blue Max” had a budget for full-scale battles going on down below, with trenches and barbed wire ,etc. Troops scurrying this way and that at the earshot of fighter planes. “Von Richtofen and Brown” was filmed on a budget of less than a Million dollars, so instead of a full-scale World War I battle going on underneath on the ground, it looks like a slow, sleepy day on an Irish dairy farm or an open field where vintage airplane enthusiasts have gathered to get high.
The general and generic plot brings itself to a juncture where somehow the burgeoning German Air Force believes that High Command wants the pilots to color their planes flamboyantly so it is easier for pilots to tell who is shooting at whom, that previously, aside for specific markings at certain spots on the planes, that all the planes on both sides were beginning to look indistinguishable to the pilots. The German pilots go up in the air in planes that are suddenly colored Yellow, Red, Green, etc. and the switch throws the British off, the energy of these scenes give off a vibe of a newly created Bohemian Air Force.
Quite a bit of this film is spent in the air, repeating shots of planes being struck by gunfire and subsequently smoking and tailing out are witnessed. Reused shots of planes exploding in mid-air (How did they do that in 1971? Did the pilot jump out and parachute to the ground? I have so many questions.)There are zero, and I repeat zero (Not a World War 2 fighter plane reference) process shots in this film. Every single cockpit and flying scene is performed in the air. We get a shitload of shots of pilots in the air firing their machine guns, pilots getting hit by gunfire and slumping over in their planes as the planes go down, this must have been an incredibly dangerous film to make in the days of pre-CGI, there are a plethora of plane crashes and explosions in this film, I don’t dare take a guess as to how many of each there are. The presentation of the famed German Air Corps “Flying Circus” makes all the sense in the world when viewed in vibrant color. Watching this film made me think more than once “How did they get away with all this stunt flying with no special effects and nobody dying?” The answer is, they didn’t.
Michael Reed was the director of photography for this movie, the photography and aerial photography by Peter Allwork and Seamus Corcoran is simply stunning, especially when you consider all the aerial footage was done from nearby aircraft in flight with no special effects. Stunt Pilot Charles Buddington was killed during filming near Dublin, Ireland. The following day, another crisis on set nearly killed stunt pilot Lynn Garrison and actor Don Stroud. Meanwhile, local airplane enthusiasts were so excited about the filming of “Richtofen and Brown” and all of it’s aerial activity, that a group of people led by American expatriate Birch Williams decided to film their own amateur plane movie around the same time the Roger Corman directed film was shooting and nearby as well, filming near Leixlip County, Kildare, Ireland. Williams apparently had been the source for some of the vintage planes that both productions of “The Blue Max” and “Richtofen and Brown” were using. The filming of the amateur movie led immediately to the tragic deaths of three more people, involved in a mid-air collision of two small planes. All of theses mounting air tragedies in such a small period of time and small area caused Irish authorities to briefly halt production of “Von Richtofen and Brown” so that they they could conduct an investigation.
When filming continued and completed what remained was a movie that I believe for all of it’s amateur flaws is something of a museum piece, a handsome-looking visual depiction of a Historical era that is difficult to get an accurate perspective on as it slips away into time. Due to Corman’s budget limitations, I believe “Von Richtofen and Brown” is giving a more realistic representation of what World War I may have looked like due to it was a more informal war and lower-scale at times than we are led to believe. The French film from 1976 by Director Jean Jacques Annaud, “Black and White in Color” also shares this depiction of World War I as an underwhelming and underhanded personal war of etiquette at times. That the world of the aviators in those days had to be mostly men with some education, this technology was most likely beyond the skill sets of the everyday commoners. I could see people stepping into a viewing room at a Historical Museum in the present day and watching the flying segments of this movie as an example of what World War I dogfights looked like.
“Richtofen and Brown watches like it’s the film version of the Reader’s Digest edition of the tale of the Red Baron. What it ends up looking like in History’s mind’s eye is a Smithsonian-like cinematic exercise in what the airplane dogfights of World War One looked and sounded like if they were isolated from the World War I battlefield. Like an aero World War One battle reenactment, where as an added and unwanted anecdotal bonus known to film Historians, people actually lost their lives on the set of the making of this film. Now that I think about it, Peter O’Toole’s crazed director character in the 1980 film directed by Richard Rush, “The Stunt Man” is filming a World War One movie where a stunt man gets killed……..what are the odds?
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