Two men were killed filming Roger Corman's Von Richthofen and Brown (1971). I don't think anyone died making this film. They built their own replica World War One planes with modern engines. Kind of a compromise between using then-50-year-old vintage planes and the CGI they use now. They could have used remote-controlled models like they did in Battle of Britain. Their machineguns never seemed to run out of bullets.
It was made only 50 years after the war, like if they made a movie ten years ago about Vietnamese pilots shooting down American planes, which would be something a lot of us would root for. John McCain was bombing a civilian light bulb factory, a war crime, when he was shot down. To hell with that guy.
World War One was so pointless it's hard to get excited about it, but George Peppard stars as a German pilot desperate to win The Blue Max, a medal you got for shooting down twenty enemy planes. He should have been happy just to be out of the trenches, where he was in the opening scene, looking up at the biplanes overhead wishing he could be one of those guys.
He was like one of these Hollywood guys. It's not enough that they're rich and famous and working in the movie business---they've just got to have an Oscar.
The arial footage got repetitive. I didn't know which stunts to be impressed by. Flying a plane under a bridge doesn't seem that big a deal, and the pilot reportedly did it over 20 times for the movie.
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