The Blue Max

I've always liked the movie The Blue Max.

The plot overview is this: Bruno Stachel is a German infantryman in World War One who decides to become a pilot (smart decision, I think). He's completely eaten up with lust for the Blue Max, Germany's highest military decoration, and pretty soon he's completely eaten up with lust for Kaete, who happens to be the wife of a well-placed German general and the aunt and lover of a pilot in Stachel's squadron.

Everyone in the movie is a bastard. Stachel is a bastard. Willi is a bastard, just a somewhat cultured one. The General is a bastard, just an officious one. Even Kaete is a bastard. The only person who isn't a bastard is Stachel's squadron commander, and he's kind of a well-intentioned boob who doesn't fully realize that 1918 isn't the same as 1450.

In the end, nobody is well-served. Willi and Bruno have a penis-measuring contest, and Willi crashes into a building and dies in the midst of it. Stachel is double-crossed and dies in a prototype monoplane fighter that we're not supposed to recognize as a Moraine-Saulnier trainer from the 1930s. Kaete ends up with The Stuffy Old General, which doesn't seem like the desired outcome from her point of view (but since her other lovers are dead, well, one takes what one can get). And The Stuffy Old General is on the losing side of a doomed war and a few short months will no longer be a general and will be asking the German equivalent of "You want fries with that?"

But it's still a good movie. The flying scenes are particularly good. Most of the airplanes are recognizable as British Tiger Moth trainers equipped with Pfalz-shaped rudders, but that's okay; at least they're biplanes and they are neither models nor computer-generated. But some of the airplanes are very nicely done - the Fokker Dr.1 triplanes, the Fokker D.VII biplanes, and the British SE5A fighters are reproductions, but excellent reproductions. (The only real giveaway that the Dr.1s are reproductions is the fact that they are powered by conventional fixed-crankcase radial engines and not rotaries, but I can live with that. And I think the SE5As are missing a Vickers MG on the cowling. But I can live with that too.)

In general, the flying scenes are magnificent, the airplanes are excellent, and the movie conveys a very strong sense of realism in its flying scenes. Throw in George Peppard as a grinning and ice-cold bastard, and Jeremy Kemp as a sly aristocratic bastard, and you've got the makings of a war movie masterpiece.

But I ask you, how did they get that towel to stick to Ursula Andress's breasts?