Von Richtofen & Brown [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

The sky's the limit for adventure! Two of history's most fabled flyboys square off in daring,acrobatic duels of death, in Von Richthofen and Brown, a high flying tale of famous battles...and infamous daredevils.Baron Manfred von Richthofen (John Philip Law),Germany's legendary Red Baron, is an aristocratic knight of the skies.But his chivalrous sense of honour doesn't mean he's merciful- some 80 pilots have lost their lives to this steel-willed ace of aces.In contrast , canadian wheat farmer,Roy Brown (Don Stroud) couldn't care less about honor.He lives, the enemy dies-in any way Brown can make it happen. And so, when these two very different men go head-to-head ina winner-take-all showdown,it's a swooping,bullet-filled confrontation that puts their skill and their courage to the ultimate test.

Technically a dud bomb when you consider what Howard Hughes was doing with `Hell's Angels' in the 1920's. If you are an aviation buff you cannot fail to notice in the opening scene how a landing Albatross shutting down magically turns into a Fokker D7. Or how, from the beginning of the movie the standard aircraft is the Fokker D7, and the future fighter is going to be the Fokker DR1 (the DR1 was on the scene long before the D7). Also, in some of the squadron shots one can see one or two aircraft that came into being long after the first world war ended.

From a historical point of view there are some inaccuracies, Roy Brown was the middle child of a fairly well off family, while Manfred Von Richthoven was not the tallest man around (in every scene he appears to tower above his fellow actors.)

Having said that, this film does have a saving grace and that is that the aerial shots were filmed live and are not CGI. It gives one a sense of reality (compared to such absolute crud like 'Flyboys').

One has to remember that this was filmed in the early 1970's, before special effects became an art form with 'Star Wars'. (As a point of interest, one of the stunt pilots on the movie was Richard Bach, the famous author).

For entertainment value, its good. Although I wish they would re-digitilize the sound and picture for todays market. (And what would be wrong with a bit of CGI tweaking to bring this movie into the modern age?)

Very much the odd man out in Roger Corman's filmography, Von Richtofen and Brown is the kind of picture that's been despised by those military historians for its many inaccuracies long before it was established that Brown wasn't responsible for shooting down the ace and has never enjoyed much of a reputation with general audiences or critics either. Yet taken in its own terms it's a particularly fine allegory of the death of delusional notions of chivalry and the beginning of mass mechanised murder as it charts the twin courses of the Prussian aristocrat who is embraced by his comrades and the Canadian garage mechanic who is rejected by his. That Brown was actually the son of a local power company owner who was studying business administration before the war and had a very different attitude to aerial combat that the one he espouses in the film gives some idea of how much historical accuracy you can expect, but this is more about myth-making in a realistic setting than facts, printing the legend from a disillusioned 70s perspective.

Corman's last directorial credit until Frankenstein Unbound [DVD] [1991] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC], it was not a lucky picture - one pilot died, production was briefly shut down due to a plane crash unrelated to the film and there was a potentially fatal bird strike crash involving Don Stroud and pilot Lynn Garrison left them treading water for 45 minutes before being rescued. Critics were unimpressed, box-office was poor and the film merely regarded as an anomaly in Corman's work. Yet it's one of his most intriguing and incisive films and infinitely better than the politically correct and even more inaccurate recent German take on the legend, The Red Baron [DVD] [2008], that reduced Von Richtofen and Brown (who never met on the ground) not only into frenemies but romantic rivals for the same nurse. Instead it casts them as the embodiment of two different approaches to the business of killing who blaze a trail for the more callous men who follow and overtake them as the war constantly escalates.

John Philip Law's Von Richtofen is the Prussian military ideal, an aristocrat bred for war and embraced by his comrades, nimbly walking a tightrope between notions of chivalry and honour and ruthlessness: as he amply demonstrates on the pool table, "The game is not to give but to take." He's at once a proud part of the old order but enough of a pioneer to embrace new technology and previously unthinkable tactics, becoming a public idol, propaganda tool and a political pawn in the process. He revels in his success and the adoration of (most of) his men, casting silver trophies for each new kill, or at least until war shortages mean the silver runs out and is replaced by base metal.

In stark contrast, Don Stroud's Brown is an outsider in a gentlemen's corps that believes that "men can be enemies without becoming beasts. Those who survive this business will find they still have need of those traditions which separate gentlemen from savages." Rather than play the magnanimous rival and toast his enemies, he regards himself as "just a technician. I change things. Put a plane in front of me, with a man in it, I change them into a wreck and a corpse." He's despised by the old guard because they're forced to agree with his view that the war will be won by men, not knights. But while he thinks he's stripping away the pretence of war as if he were stripping down an engine to fix it, he comes to realise that there's a need for those seemingly idiotic gestures: "We have to pretend or go mad." Where his pragmatism is born of a contempt for the myths of glorious death that justify continuing slaughter, he finds the men who replace the old order regarding it far more callously and removing the human element entirely. As one cheerfully tells him, "We're not talking about philosophy. War is a problem in applied physics."

But both men find their own ruthlessness exceeded by others and can only watch as the world goes mad around them. Brown's fiercest critics and enemies among his own ranks become more genuinely bloodthirsty than him as the pretence is stripped away as the gentleman officers are killed off. Even the adoration and authority Von Richtofen's celebrity endows on him is gradually eroded as he outlives his time, seeing his breed of professional gentleman soldier replaced first by reluctant conscripts who, far from revelling in the chance to prove themselves on the field of battle, feel like pheasants in Autumn, and later by more ruthless men already planning the next war while acknowledging this one is lost. As the war and the film nears its bleak conclusion, he finds himself increasingly at odds with Hermann Goering's mentality that civilians are legitimate targets (not historically accurate, but it's a valid artistic choice considering the way Goering would adopt just that approach in the Second World War). Yet his objections that "You're not a soldier, you're an assassin" are not only rebuffed with "The soldiers are losing. I make war to win. Doesn't matter how," but he finds himself becoming the outsider as the other jaded pilots fail to share his outrage at this pragmatic lack of honour. And as the final dogfight looms ever closer, the roots of Nazism become ever more apparent, whether it's the Baron's father (Ferdy Mayne) or the high command planning to use the army for political housecleaning once the war is over.

The leads are well cast, Corman cannily turning their limitations into strengths. Law, the kind of Fabio Testi-like actor whose `special skills' section on his resume was probably limited to `Tall, good looking, great posture: really good at standing to attention,' is ideal, getting to show a bit more range than usual (his reaction to a bloodthirsty pep talk from the Kaiser is a gem) but never given anything that will tax his abilities in a part that plays surprisingly well to his strengths. Brando-alike Stroud has more range as an actor but reins in his bitterness effectively, and his lack of major star status that did the film no favors at the box-office works well as the unlikely hero who sticks out like a sore thumb.

As usual with Corman he gets a lot of bang for his buck, avoiding the lengthy weather delays that played havoc with The Blue Max and Darling Lili's budgets by shooting on `Blue Days, Grey Days and Don't Give a Damn Days' rather than waiting for ideal conditions. He not only packs a lot of ideas and incident into his 96 minutes of screen time but also gets some fine production values along the way, from an interesting supporting cast filled with never-quite-made-it familiar faces (Hurd Hatfield, a dubbed Barry Primus, Stephen McHattie, Corin Redgrave, Tom Adams) to Hugo Friedhofer's classy score. That the planes aren't always the right models is down to Corman using the squadron and many of the sets built for The Blue Max six years earlier, and they're put to particularly good use here over the skies of Ireland even if there are no standout virtuoso dogfight sequences - the emphasis here is more on the relentless business of death than visceral excitement. Not that the footage isn't impressive, especially when it very clearly really is the actors in the air (sometimes even getting bloodily shot up), the in-flight cockpit shots never relying on back projection or special effects. It may cut away to stunt flyers for the tricky stuff, but seeing their faces distorted by the speed really adds to the film's credibility in the air.

It may not have the obvious cult appeal of Corman's classic Poe adaptations and it's not for those more interested in pedantic details or broader historical facts, but despite its occasional shortcomings, Von Richtofen and Brown is a fine bit of contemplative mythmaking that deserves rediscovery and re-evaluation.

While MGM/UA's NTSC DVD offers an acceptable but unexciting transfer, it's recently been given a fine Blu-ray release in Germany, with a superior transfer that's much truer to the original look of the film, stills gallery, German and US trailers (the latter without any captions or credits) and a recent 32-minute interview in English with Corman to promote the release of Corman's World in Germany. Von Richtofen and Brown is only mentioned briefly, but it's an interesting dip into his career with the genial producer-director on articulate form about the problems facing independent producers in a theatrical market now dominated by big budget studio fare and with declining DVD revenues. Well worth seeking out.