The Blue Max August 18, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, War Films , 2 commentsFirst published in another form at The DVD Forums
The Western Front, 1916. A blasted landscape.
As far as the eye can see, a wasteland of mud, a few shrapnel scarred tree trunks, total and incredible destruction. Suddenly, the air is filled with sound of explosions, the chatter and whine of machine gun bullets and a motley band of dishevelled and terrified German troops run for their lives.
They are scythed down, all bar who one leaps into the water and corpse filled safety of a shell hole. Covered in filth, gasping for breath, he hears the sound of aircraft engines. He lifts his head and looks upwards, longingly, into a sky as clear and true as his blue, blue eyes.
Jump to 1918 and we see the same the same blue-eyed, blond haired soldier now wearing the uniform of the German Air Corps and thus transfigured into a higher being. He’s being transferred to his first squadron from training school. From the comfort of his transport, he looks with an almost condescending pity at the retreating battalions around him, lying by the roadside; those earthbound wretches from whose ranks he has very recently escaped. He swigs from a bottle of schnapps and with a toss of his wrist, charitably throws the remains to a thirsty trooper. Bruno Stachel has access to plenty of booze; he’s a flyer now, and, in more ways than just the obvious, he is on his way up…
The pre-credit sequence of the 1966 John Guillermin WW1 flying epic The Blue Max is economical film making at its best, getting pages and pages of narrative over in a couple of minutes. For Guillermin, an English journeyman director, this was his first big Hollywood film, though by 1966 he was an experienced hand, having worked with the mad genius Peter Sellers twice (the marvellous Never Let Go and Waltz of The Toreadors), Peter O’Toole (The Day They Robbed the Bank of England) and even had a stab at a legendary (if not a little shopworn by that stage) Hollywood figure with the pretty lame Tarzan Goes to India. Guillermin went on to helm The Bridge at Remagen, The Towering Inferno and the misguided but sometimes fun King Kong remake (man in ape suit; yikes! Jessica Lange; yum!)
At two and a half hours, this could have been a bit of a slog, but it’s surprisingly entertaining, in fact, more entertaining than it has any right to be. As Stachel, George Peppard is excellent. In a nutshell he’s a quintessential patsy and everyone knows it but poor Bruno. From the off he’s used and abused, and ultimately he’s the victim of his own drive to be accepted and to break out of the stifling European straitjacket of class and status.
The battle lines are drawn when he’s asked by Heidermann (Karl Michael Vogler), the squadron commander who his ‘people’ are. Stachel is non-plussed, but Heidermann, who, like many airforce officers of the period is upper middle class, insists: ‘What does your father do?’ Stachel stammers that his father runs a small hotel, and then compounds his social faux pas by adding ‘It has five bedrooms.’ So exhausted have the German Air Corps become (like the Royal Air Force post Battle of Britain) that it has been forced to accept the lower classes into its ranks; what next? Egomaniacal ex-Corporals leading the nation of the Kaisers?
Heidermann is gently horrified and seems determined that this upstart will get nowhere. Stachel’s fellow pilots see this guileless child in their midst, and mercilessly take the rise, but Willi von Klugermann (Jeremy Kemp) - though he refers to Stachel as ‘your kind’ - sees something in the newcomer to mark him out as a rival. Stachel confirms this when he determines that he will gain the respect of his peers, and the surest route is to kill. Winning the Order Pour le Merit, awarded to aces for 20 ‘kills’, and commonly known as ‘The Blue Max’, becomes Bruno’s obsession.
Still playing at war with notions of a demented ‘chivalry’* (don’t talk about your kills, don’t boast, kill your opponent then honour his memory, etc., etc.) Stachel is wrongly accused by his peers of not behaving honourably. Klugermann’s uncle, General Count von Klugermann (the ever magnificent James Mason), also treats the newcomer with contempt, but sees an opportunity to create a hero for the beleaguered German working classes - they are used to seeing Baron Von Richtofen lauded by the press, but says, von Klugermann, his eyes flashing at the mere thought,‘one of their own…?’
Stachel is also marked out by the Baron’s young wife, Countess Kaeti von Klugermann (Ursula Andress), as a future ‘kill’. The Countess fancies a bit of ‘rough’, especially one on the verge of becoming a national hero. The problem is, she’s already shagging Willi (no pun intended, gentle reader), her nephew by marriage.
This sets Stachel and von Klugermann on a collision course, but while Bruno’s star rises with every enemy ‘plane downed, he doesn’t realise that, one way or another, he’s doomed anyway. Against his will, circumstances, and the prejudice of others, turn him into the liar and the cheat that they all expect him to be. And there’s the fact that the 1918 offensive, which very nearly wins the war for Germany, soon becomes a headlong retreat. Will Stachel get the Blue Max and the respect he craves?
Guillermin’s film obviously takes wing with the spectacular flying sequences, directed by Anthony Squire, who had performed the same chore for David Lean with The Sound Barrier. Using replicas of Sopwiths, Fokkers, disguised modern biplanes, and other ’string and candle wax’ aircraft of the period, these are never less than exhilarating. The sparing use of models - hard to spot by the way - make for very realistic flying scenes, the biplanes and triplanes careering around the skies as mad kites, spitting machine gun fire like deadly airborne pea shooters. Towards the end of the film you see Peppard, a keen aviator, perform in his own monoplane.
The flying sequences are far better than those of The Battle of Britain, during which, the myriad problems of filming the airborne footage almost wrecked the production. Filming aircraft whose speeds were over 200 mph less than those of Hurricanes and Spitfires must have, in comparison, seemed a doddle. The ’scope cinematography by the legendary Douglas Slocombe is quite marvellous, and Jerry Goldsmith’s score is used sparingly, but his main theme in particular is one of his very best. The way his conjures up the feeling of soaring, the thrum, thrum, thrum, of engines, the thrill of victory - quite superb.
The one problem with movies in English, but seen from ‘the other side’, is the variety of accents employed. It’s easier to accept in this case, for instance, with the number of European actors in the cast, so everyone has a stab at ‘a Cherman ackzent’, except Peppard who gets by by enunciating his lines very carefully indeed… Anyhow, I’m always hugely entertained by Darren Nesbitt’s European accent, though this version is not quite as hilarious as the one he used for Where Eagles Dare. Bless. I must mention that Andress and Peppard do share the most erotic bedroom scene, which must have done wonders for fluffy white bathroom towel sales. Whatever happened to eroticism in movies?
The 150 minutes pass quite quickly. This is not a movie with any great deep meaning or message, even if it does examine the class system and the underpinnings of fame and celebrity; it’s just decent, solid entertainment.
Fox’s DVD of this film is pretty good. In anamorphic OAR, there are few instances of dirt or marks, and it’s pretty sharp with little evidence of edge enhancement. It is a little dark in places, but as I didn’t see this theatrically, I can’t confirm that this vaguely ‘antique’ look was an intentional stylistic production decision; it doesn’t detract as far as this viewer is concerned. They’ve retained the intermission screen, with Goldsmith’s original music to cover it - I love that. The only extra is a trailer. The R2, which is the subject of this review, also comes with a whole slew of subtitles and language options; you can listen in mono in English, French, German, Italian or Spanish.
*Chivalrous notions still exist; in Iraq the Americans lambasted their opponents for flying white flags, then, when US commanders stepped forward to parlez, insurgent spotters targetted them with morters. Far more chivalrous to blow people to little bits with rockets and tanks…Madness, madness…