Von Richthofen and Brown (1971)

The greatest movie ever!

Excellent, a Must See

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

VON RICHTHOFEN AND BROWN was one of those movies I'd been dying to see for years and I must admit that I wasn't as disappointed as I was afraid I was going to be: it's a thoroughly enjoyable (if often historically wonky) action movie, and boasts perhaps the finest dogfights ever committed to film (certainly far superior to the aerial combat sequences in movies like THE BLUE MAX and THE RED BARON). The greatest fault with VON RICHTHOFEN AND BROWN is, of course, the script: it comes to us from the same husband and wife team who botched both Richard Matheson's I AM LEGEND (retitled THE OMEGA MAN, though Neville in the movie was clearly NOT the last man on Earth) and the dreadful BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES; that VON RICHTHOFEN AND BROWN turned out as well as it did is something of a miracle and no doubt attributable to Roger Corman's direction. Though (justifiably) famous for his low budget forays into Fantasy and Exploitation films, Corman pulls off quite a coup here. Kudos.

The ( fictional ) life of WW1's greatest flying ace. This film receives a lot of negative attention due to the fact that it differs from historical truth quite a lot. However that aside the film is quite decent since the acting is quite good and it features great flying sequences and really nice planes that are all accurate for the time . It's not going to be fun to watch for anyone who knows about Von Richtofen , but it is just a film after all and does provide excitement and enjoyable drama so it definitely is worth giving a watch. It is quite similar to the battle of the bulge film in the sense it tramples all over historical events in order to create a better and more exciting story. Unorthodox but still a good film.

I don't see the sense in going through so much trouble to make a movie like this, and then throw the history book out the window. There wasn't a single accurate detail in that movie other than the fact than Richtofen died, which I was grateful for at the end so I didn't have to watch any more. Movies like this are an insult to anyone who knows anything about WWI aerial history.I'll skip the obvious, that they were flying Fokker DVII's in 1916, because the Blue Max did that too, or that 209 squadron was flying SE-5's, and will attack other parts. For one thing, they call the Pfalz D-III an 'old Albatross' at the beginning. For another, they have Voss, Goring, and Wolff all in Jasta Boelcke. The only one who was in that Jasta was Voss, and he joined after Boelcke died. Richtofen wasn't held to blame for Boelcke's death...Erwin Boehme, who collided with Boelcke, had swerved to avoid a British plane that Richtofen was chasing. When Richtofen received his head wound, it was while attacking a FE-2d two-seater, and he did not crash into the trenches and have soldiers fight over him, and NO..Werner Voss did not die that day. He died September 28th in one of the most epic battles in WWI.Manfred was short, not like the actor who towered over everyone else. His brother Lothar was never in Jasta Boelcke either, he joined the squadron when Manfred was in charge of Jasta 11.There's so many other glaring errors in historical fact that I'll let them go except perhaps the worst one, the death scene. In the movie Manfred is out-maneuvered by Brown and then shot down, making a perfect landing. Brown got off one burst at Richtofen while Richtofen was chasing May, and the facts amassed over the years overwhelmingly show that Richtofen was killed by ground fire, not by Brown.The only value in this movie was the chance to see the flying scenes themselves, which were as good as 'The Blue Max', other than that I won't watch it again and I paid $30 for the tape!

It is pointed out that "goofs" were made in the making of this film. (A) Von Richofen is depicted flying a Fokker D-VII over a year before the plane was actually introduced (and prior to flying the Triplane) (B) Brown's squadron is shown flying SE 5s when in actuality, they were equipped with Sopwith Camels.I suspect these were intentional choices on the part of the director. Von Richtofen's plane in early 1917 was actually an Albatros D5 - an improvement over the earlier D3, but having an unfortunate tendency to shed its wings in a dive. Even if this were corrected in a modern reproduction, the Albatros design is nose-heavy and difficult to control.The Sopwith Camel, while an effective fighting machine, was called th "Widow-maker" for good reason. It's extremely high-torque rotary engine made it very difficult to fly and very unforgiving of mistakes. The SE 5 and 5a, on the other hand were fairly stable craft and easier for novice pilots (they've been used exclusively in other WW I films).Only hard-core WWI historians would have noticed these inconsistencies, and I suspect the choices were made for the safety of the stunt pilots. Don't let them stop you from enjoying some great aerial combat scenes.Incidentally, the events that were reversed were the circumstances of von Richtofen's crashes. In the first one, he is depicted as crash landing, while in the second (fatal) one, the plane actually lands quite well by itself (this would NEVER have happened in a Fokker triplane!)It was actually the other way around. The first time, the wounded von Richtofen managed to bring his Albatros to a landing. The second time -already dead before he hit the ground - the plane crashed in no-man's land near an Australian unit who may indeed have hit him from the ground.