THE BLUE MAX Movie Review
1966 John Guillermin
John Guillermin collects all of the conventions of the early 1930s flying adventures and adds an unmistakable mid-1960s spin to create an enjoyable but understandably uneven entertainment. Many parts of the film work beautifully. In fact, the flying scenes are among the best ever put on screen. But whenever sex-starlet Ursula Andress shows up, the illusion of 1918 reality evaporates. Her appearance is completely at odds with everything else around her. She's decorous and undeniably sexy—that's what the cinematic marketplace of 1966 demanded—but she's also as anachronistic as a thong bikini in a stagecoach.
In 1916, Bruno Stachel (George Peppard) is fighting for the Fatherland on the Western Front (actually Ireland). Exhausted in the midst of battle, he takes refuge in a muddy crater and looks up to see two biplanes soaring high and slowly above him. Flash forward two years. The foot soldier has managed to transfer out of the Army and into the Air Corps, where he's a newly minted pilot. Ruthlessly ambitious, Bruno dreams of getting 20 kills. For those, he'll be rewarded with a medal, the Blue Max, and that will make him the equal of anyone. Heidemann (Karl Michael Vogler), Bruno's new squadron leader, already has a Blue Max, and the veteran flyer Willi von Klugermann (Jeremy Kemp) is closing in on his. More importantly, Willi and Heidemann are members of the aristocratic “officer corps.” Bruno, son of a hotel keeper, really doesn't fit in.
At least, he doesn't fit in until Count von Klugermann (James Mason), Willi's uncle and a high-ranking officer, realizes Bruno's potential value. “If this young man lives long enough,” the Count reasons, “he could be useful to our propaganda department. The common people of our country are war-weary, restive. They need to be provided with a hero of their own. Von Richthofen and Willi are of our class. Now, this fellow Stachel is common as dirt. He's one of them!”
The film's central conflict boils down to a competition between Heidemann's old-school, chivalrous knight-of-the-air approach and Bruno's pragmatic survival-of-the-fittest tactics. The more interesting relationship, though, is between Bruno and Willi. It always is in this sort of movie. While Peppard has enough screen presence as a movie star to carry the lead, he's not a good enough actor to make Bruno's obsessive ambition seem fully real. Jeremy Kemp's slyly comic cynicism is a welcome balance, and he walks away with all of his scenes, both on the ground and in the air.
Credit for the aerial work is shared by director Guillermin, aerial director Anthony Squire, and director of photography Douglas Slocombe. Together they manage to integrate the flying sequences into the larger narrative. It's not simply a matter of dog-fights between British and German fighters; conflicts on the ground are settled or expanded in the air. Toward the end, when the Germans are attacking ground forces, the scenes are as tense and explosive as those in Wings, Dawn Patrol, or any of the “classics.”
Guillermin attempts to keep the ground-based action as interesting as the rest and he's generally successful. To use the Hollywood cliche, this is a big budget picture and every penny is on the screen. Note the lavishly staged state dinner with an impressive crane shot at the center. Guillermin also deserves credit for historical accuracy in the hospital scenes, and civilian life in 1918 Germany, complete with horses and road apples in the city streets.
In the end, The Blue Max is more enjoyable as simple escapism than as a serious war film, but those magnificent aerial sequences are enough to recommend it to fans. Jack Hunter's novel is a much more carefully observed portrait of those times. More appropriately but less cinematically, it ends with Stachel meeting a young Herman Goering.
This is a CinemaScope film, and Guillermin makes use of the whole screen. On video, the widescreen version is preferable to the sometimes clumsy pan-and-scan.
Cast: George Peppard (Bruno Stachel), James Mason (Count von Klugermann), Ursula Andress (Kaeti), Jeremy Kemp (Willi von Klugermann), Karl Michael Vogler (Heidemann), Anton Diffring (Holbach), Harry Towb (Kettering), Peter Woodthorpe (Rupp), Derek Newark (Ziegel), Derren Nesbitt (Fabian), Loni von Friedl (Effi); Written by: Ben Barzman, Basilio Franchina, David Pursall, Jack Seddon, Gerald Hanley; Cinematography by: Douglas Slocombe; Music by: Jerry Goldsmith. Producer: 20th Century-Fox, Christian Ferry, Elmo Williams. Running Time: 155 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta, LV, Letterbox.