70s Rewind: 'Von Richthofen and Brown,' Roger Corman Goes to War

Roger Corman picked his battles carefully, direciting only three military movies. Two of them were quite good, including this high-flying adventure.

Now Streaming: Before wars were numbered like sequels, Von Richthofen and Brown told the tale of two military men who battled in the skies, pitting the real-life, aristocratic Red Baron against a rough-hewn, blue-collar Canadian. 

(Admittedly, I only knew of the Red Barton from reading Charles M. Schultz’ Peanuts, where he first appeared in October 1965.)

Casting the lanky John Philip Law as ace German pilot Manfred Von Richthofen and the down-to-earth Don Stroud as the bull-headed Canadian Roy Brown reflected great casting choices by director Roger Corman. Law had already had prominent roles in Danger: Diabolik and Barbarella (both 1968), while Stroud had recently starred with intense, menacing energy in Corman's 30s gangster picture Bloody Mama. 

Von Richthofen carries himself with old-school grace and elegance, moving easily between high society and the military. Roy Brown is a pilot who arrives as an outsider when he is assigned to a British squadron in 1917; he needs to drink milk to calm his stomach before flying, but his strategic instincts as a warrior win over his commanding officer. 

This was the first feature film written by Joyce Hooper Carrington and John William Carrington, a married couple; John had already written poetry and short stories. They also wrote The Omega Man (1970), directed by Boris Sagal; Boxcar Bertha (1971), directed by Martin Scorsese; The Arena (1972), directed by Steve Carver; and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), as well as the TV movie The Killer Bees (1974). 

Roger Corman's first military movie was Ski Troop Attack (1960), which he shot on location in the Black Hills in South Dakota, which pitted an American ski patrol against a German ski patrol during World War II. Corman cast rival high school ski teams in Deadwood as the skiers, and a German-born ski instructor to lead the Nazis. Unfortunately, the ski instructor broke his leg two days before shooting was to begin. As he recounts in his autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, written with Jim Jerome and published by Random House in 1990:  

"There was no time to get anyone else. So I decided to play the role myself. Aside from the fact that I neither skied nor spoke German, I was totally prepared for the part."

Corman survived a harrowing trek up a hill in one shot 'barely,' he admits. Sadly, the Filmways production does not look great in its current streaming incarnation, to the point that it's difficult to make out Corman, the skiers, or even to tell the Americans apart from the Nazis. [Tubi] 

His next military movie, The Secret Invasion (1964), looks much, much better nowadays, owing to its origins as Corman's first film for a major Hollywood studio, United Artists, which "budgeted the production at $600,000, which was double my bigger Poe pictures." And you can tell. It was "a matter of pride to get the full production value on the screen." His brother Gene Corman produced. As Roger Corman described it: 

"In its final cut, The Secret Invasion looked like a big movie and we did it for exactly $592,000." 

Indeed, the film is rousing entertainment, based on a script by Bob Campbell (Corman's The Young Racers) and borrowing the set-up from Corman's debut feature, Five Guns West, with five criminals set loose by the military during World War II for a noble mission. The studio wanted the criminals to be "full-out heroes with less subtlety than [Corman] might have sought," but the film still leads up to an amazing third act that is nearly continuous action involving hundreds of soldiers in fierce combat. It's quite good, and more brutal than modern audiences might expect for a movie released in 1963. [Tubi]

In the fall of 1969, while overseas to make Von Richthofen and Brown, his third and last military movie, Corman attended the Edinburgh Film Festival to attend the local premiere of Gas-s-s-s!, he was shocked to see that American International Pictures (AIP) had cut the final shot of his movie 'because they didn't like what God was saying' in thE scene, part of his commentary as a running character in the movie. That became Corman's last movie for AIP. 

Von Richthofen and Brown features spectacular dogfights between the British and the Germans, which I assumed, while I was watching, were all filmed by second-unit photographers in the air. Not so, according to Corman, who shot all the aerial shots in two weeks! 

When you watch the film, this is stunning to contemplate, because the dogfight sequences are among the best I have ever seen. Corman was stationed on a 30-foot high tower that the production built in Ireland; his art director and second-unit director, Jimmy Murakami, shot from a second camera in a helicopter; and a third cameraman shot from an oil plane that could fly slower and still capture great footage. Corman stood by the fixed camera on the wooden tower and served as an air-traffic controller, "guiding ten aircraft into and out of three dogfights." 

Two of the planes had cameras bolted on, which the actor in the back seat could activate at the best moments possible. For one sequence, they found themselves one gunner short. So Julie Halloran, a woman he had dated for six years and came on as a production assistant on her way elsewhere in Europe, responded.

"Give me a helmet." she said, out of the blue. "I'll get in there and do it." 

I was stunned. "You want to do that?" 

"I'll just pull my hair up, pull the helmet way down, and put on the goggles. Nobody'll ever know."

No wonder that, several months after production had concluded, Roger and Julie were married, a happy union that only concluded when Roger passed away recently. 

That was to be the last movie Corman directed until Frankenstein Unbound (1990). In the remainder of the 1970s and throughout the rest of his life, he focused on mentoring new talent, producing a boatload of movies directed by others, and distributing surprising movies. His movies always flew by, and were always entertaining. 

And they were always cheap! That's not a bad thing. [Tubi]