Heels in the Air

The Blue Max. Vintage airplanes are currently among the most accomplished scene-stealers in movies. Grouped like angry mosquitoes in the grey-green skies over France during World War I, a handful of meticulously reconstructed biplanes and triplanes give this ambitious battle drama its only real sting. Goggled pilots, scarves tucked into their leather daredevil jackets, scramble aloft to trigger a full-throttle facsimile of the epic aerial combats of 1918. Of course, as members of an enemy German squadron, the men in their flying machines are shown to be less than magnificent.

Hopping purposefully in and out of the open cockpits is Anti-hero George Peppard, cast as Stachel, an upstart fly-boy whose killer instincts devastate both friend and foe before he can claim "the Blue Max," pilot slang for Germany's equivalent of the Medal of Honor.* In the novel by Jack D. Hunter, Stachel was a murderous, alcoholic blackmailer, but a trio of adapters has softened the edges of Peppard's role, following the unwritten Hollywood law that a hero-heel must be boyish, winning, and a terror abed. As a nod to custom, death in the last reel redeems him.

As Peppard's fellow pilots, Jeremy Kemp and Karl Michael Vogler convincingly uphold the glory of the German officer class, rattling off performances unalloyed with conventional tin soldiery and Prussian steel. Playing a hero-collecting countess who adds Peppard and Kemp to her trophy shelf, Ursula Andress is considerably handicapped by high-cut period costumes, though she manages to slither out of them from time to time.

Diffuse and emotionally flat despite its expert airborne excitement, The Blue Max sets out to be a caustic essay on honor, ends up posing questions no more timeless and universal than Who will get Ursula? and Who will be the next ace to fell 20 British planes? The only way to help such synthetic melodrama to a climax is to reveal, once more, the unstartling news that the Kaiser's forces are about to lose World War I.

*A tribute to German Aviator Max Immelmann, best remembered for the looping flight maneuver that bears his surname.

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