The Blue Max

The Blue Max (John Guillerman, 1966) Everything soars in this tale of a vainglorious WWI fighter pilot from the (evidently historically inaccurate) planes dog-fighting through the skies, the performance of its star (the usually uni-dimensional George Peppard), the high-flying score by Jerry Goldsmith (one of his best and not even nominated for an Oscar) and the swooping direction of John Guillerman that seems to be caught in the jet-streams of its vehicles and characters.  

Adapted by black-listed writer Ben Barzman from the novel by Jack D. Hunter, it tells the story of a common trench soldier, who sees an opportunity to rise in stature during the war and German society by becoming a flying ace, obsessively seeking the country's highest honor, the blue max (awarded for twenty kills), by daring and deceit. But the filmmakers changed the story from the novel, turning it more into a modern telling of Icarus than the author's original intent.

Hunter wrote a sequel, "The Blood Order," in which the protagonist of "The Blue Max," as Aryan as one could be, finds himself embroiled in the rise of the Nazi Party in the years between world wars.

The film of The Blue Max made any idea of a sequel impossible.

Peppard plays Bruno Stachel, a German soldier fighting in 1916, who sees a squad of planes ripping through British defenses during one horrific battle and decides then and there to join the German Army Air Corps. But he finds it hard to take off with so much resistance.  The aces are all aristocratic, from good families—in fact, Willi Von Klugermann (Jeremy Kemp) is the nephew of General Count Von Klugermann (James Mason) (and having an affair with the general's much younger predatory wife, played by Ursula Andress). Stachel's ambitions and duplicitous ways of achieving them rankles the aces and angers his commanding officer (Karl Michael Vogler), who is determined to never see Stachel wins his medal.

"It's a cruel world, Herr Hauptmann..."

But Stachel makes good PR—a commoner among the elite—and the General, to flag waning public acceptance of the war, uses the handsome young pilot as a symbol of Germany's greatness that the people can embrace.

He does his job only too well because one of those embracing is his own wife, Kaeti, who begins an affair with Stachel during a propaganda tour of Berlin, which only emboldens Stachel and increases the rivalry between the general's nephew and him. The two carry on a bitter feud on the ground and in the skies, and when Willi is killed in a competition of who might be the better pilot, Stachel claims the other's kills as his own, and becomes reckless and insubordinate in his missions.  And with the General's support, he can do no wrong.

Stachel's first kill and his satisfied smile

The story is a great little condemnation of martial glory after years of heroics in post-WWII war films that paint a more rosy picture of the nihilism of war, and paper it over with honor and patriotism and ideals that might seem attractive to new recruits. Certainly, for Stachel, it is better to be high in the clouds, raining death on the ground than being stuck in the mud in the trenches. And his motivations are self-serving and covetous. He is the new face of war for the 20th Century, hiding behind machines and industrialization, in the last vestiges of the personal combatant. There is no chivalry in his actions (which infuriates the other aces, still clinging to romantic notions of war and themselves as oil-soaked knights) and his motivations are his own. He is not a fighting noble man as they think themselves. He is a sociopath for whom killing is easy and the ladder to his ambition.

What he doesn't understand in his youth and his avarice, that he is merely a cog in a much bigger war machine.

With that cynicism being the heart of the story, Guillerman's direction provides the fluorish.  The aerial photography is amazing, yes. But, even on the ground Guillerman (and his cinematographer Douglas Slocombe) take a romantic's view of the proceedings, burnishing the settings, filming at eccentric angles, and moving, making the camera heave and swoop in places that are sometimes thrilling—I'm thinking of the rushing scan along the crowd during the last scene's air acrobatics, in sharp contrast to the embittered drama going on indoors. The shot choices are not safe, not staid, and contain a certain pictorial power that might give a last salute to the legends while simultaneously shooting them down.

And, as usual for the composer, Jerry Goldsmith's score provides the missing element of what the visuals can't convey—the soaring exhilaration of flight, and Stachel's over-arching ambition.  Yes, the actions we're seeing are horrible, but Goldsmith makes them thrilling with heraldic trumpets, soaring, sometimes shimmering strings, military cadences, and (as was his habit of using unusual instrumentation) even a keening wind machine to add an element of pace and danger.  The music conveys something that nothing else does—it gets into Stachel's head and perversely convinces us of why he does what he does.  It is his own version of heroism...and damned fun when things are going his way. But, like the country and cause he's ostensibly fighting for, it's doomed to failure.  

It just doesn't know it yet.

There will be no sequel...

Operation Crossbow (aka The Great Spy Mission)

Operation Crossbow (Michael Anderson, 1965) There actually was an "Operation Crossbow" during the second World War of the 20th Century, designed to stop the next generation of weapons the Nazi's were dabbling in, after the costly Battle of Britain and before an anticipated amphibious landing on the shores of Great Britain—the V-1 (or "buzzbombs") and the V-2 rockets (predecessor to both the American and Russian space programs, but designed to deliver explosives and blind destruction). The reality was a bit more mundane than here, which is staged like The Guns of Navarone (the script was initially drafted by Emeric Pressburger of "The Archers") with a team of experts charged with infiltrating the German development complex with a plan to destroy it from without and within.

As with so many of these "true stories" of the war, it's only partially true:  the threat was real; dealing with it was another matter. The film is comprised of two sections: the administrators of the mission (Richard Johnson, Trevor Howard, John Mills) coming up with various strategies to deal with the pilotless weapons and the recruits (George Peppard, Tom Courtney, and Jeremy Kemp) whose job it is to drop behind enemy lines, pose as dead or missing German engineers and infiltrate the Peenemünde rocket-works, gather information and/or sabotage the facility.

Bunker windows are letter-boxed!
Watching a V-1 test—actually the most interesting part of the film.

From the beginning, the mission is sabotaged by a lack of complete intelligence and by infiltrators in the process: one of the missing Germans is missing for a reason—he's wanted for murder and sticks out like a sore thumb to the authorities when he suddenly shows up in plain sight; one of the specialists volunteering to break into the rocket plant is a German spy (Anthony Quayle) who goes back to Germany and runs interference throughout the rest of the film.

"You want us to...what?"  Courtney, Kemp and Peppard
Operation Crossbow

Then there's Peppard's alias—seems his German has a wife (Sophia Loren) who comes looking for him when she learns that he's suddenly turned up in a German hotel. Well, that complicates things when she discovers the man with her husband's name and identity is a total stranger. She's kept under wraps by a resistance couple (Lili Palmer, Philo Hauser) until the trio can escape the scrutiny of the German authorities.

"Uh...what's she doing here?"

Loren's role is completely unnecessary—and very brief—as there are enough complications with the purloined identities to make things rough going. No, she's there to be confused, wistful, play slightly drunk, and exit, and not too quietly. Oh...and get top billing to bring in the crowds, and to provide the unnecessary (and frankly irrelevant and mislabeled) "love interest"—although it hardly qualifies—for a film that is essentially all-male in character and scope.* 
While the historically valid "Crossbow" occurs in the skies over London with the various anti-aircraft measures designed to blow the missiles out of the skies or at least knock them off-course, the trio of infiltrators (minus one) get recruited at the vast underground missile complex and begin the process of finding the weaknesses of the weapons (while ironically working to fix them to maintain their cover) and the complex (which they, unironically, intend to destroy).

Peppard and Kemp compare notes on missiles—Peppard has appeared to be
beaten up, although that sequence was cut from the film.

The film did not do well at the American box-office, prompting the studio to re-name the film The Great Spy Mission (check out the poster paste-over to the right) upon re-release as they thought the "Crossbow" reference might have confused audiences into thinking it was involving knights and archery (and as the movie-going public was in the midst of being bombarded with everything James Bond...hey, it couldn't hurt). The film, whatever its title, has more in common with The Guns of Navarone than with Bond, although the next year the Bond producers would begin work on You Only Live Twice, which, itself, more resembled Navarone and this film than anything from Fleming's source-novel. Certainly, Crossbow's imagining of Peenemünde has as much basis in reality as a hollowed-out volcano space-command does. And the writers-producers have upped the ante by introducing a new weapon that has come online—the "New York" bomb, that city presumably being the target because, hey, bombing London just isn't enough, especially if you're trying to sell a film to an American audience.

Peenemünde looks like a very big place...

As dumb as that idea is, and the whole puffery of the thing, you do have to give some sort of pointage to a film that had the balls (Spoiler Alert) to kill off two its major stars before the half-way point of the film and eliminate all of its heroes by the film's end. For all the fantasy that the film imparted to the war, it dared to not reward courage but show the indiscriminate horror of war, despite all efforts and good intentions. America was in the midst of the Vietnam war at the time, and despite its trappings of fantasy amidst the threads of the true story, it dared to show the true nihilism of war—in the generation of deliberate destruction, no one gets out alive. Operation Crossbow has real problems as a film, but it dared to not cave in to a happy ending with garlands and celebration, or even of satisfaction with a mission accomplished. It leaves the viewer with a realization of cost towards the noble in the most ignoble of times.

*Not entirely true, that: some of the best scenes involve a German aviatrix, Hannah Reitsch—yes, she did exist—who worked on the project investigating why early test pilots of the V-1 in its planning stages were being killed trying to land the thing.  She discovered the V-1's had a tendency to stall and lose all guidance capabilities—not good if you're targeting something.