The Red Baron
tarring Matthias Schweighofer, Til Schweiger, Lena Heady, and Joseph Fiennes
written and directed by Nikolai Müllerschön
Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦
I watched this 2008 biopic of WWI German flying ace Manfred von Richthofen because I heard that it features some excellent aerial combat (dogfighting) scenes. I wasn’t disappointed. I watched it twice just for that. The dogfighting in open-cockpit biplanes was superb, made for 3-D viewing, I think. Today, after a hundred years some people might have little regard, or no regard at all for First World War history and for fighter aircraft (and famous Aces) of that era which were, admittedly, primitive compared to today’s warbirds. But I admit to a great interest in WWI. Because there are still people alive today who were alive then (not combat or non-combat troops - all of those have passed), the Great War still falls within “living memory.” As such, it is more current events than ancient history. Even though those aircraft were made of wood and fabric they were the height of contemporary technology and they were deadly fighting machines. Even today, if you armed them with live ammunition, they would easily kill you dead in an instant.
A potential complaint about the film is that it glorifies war. It still glorifies the aerial war of WWI, and it glorifies von Richthofen personally. Even after a hundred years he remains a heroic figure. In Germany, this is a particular problem, despite that von Richthofen was German. Germany wants to distance itself from that kind of thinking and nostalgia.
Although von Richthofen, “The Red Baron,” is most remembered in the West flying a red-painted Fokker Triplane, he did most of his flying in an Albatross D.III, which is still a marvelous-looking machine. The film features the Red Baron trying to fight a chivalrous air campaign with honor and civility - with “grace” - in the midst of a war that was the very definition of savagery - the first industrial war. This disposition brought him into conflict with some who were more belligerent - such as his own brother, Lothar, a member of his squadron.
Manfred von Richthofen - a celebrity in his own time - died in 1918 at the age of 25, surprisingly young. Young and beautiful, healthy and arrogant, aggressive and charismatic. He entered the war as a cavalryman. The horrors of the battlefield - plus the uselessness of cavalry in modern warfare - drove him to the air service, which seemed so much cleaner from the trenches. The initial function of aircraft in the Great War was to serve as spotters, to shoot down enemy observation balloons, and to protect one’s own balloons. In that capacity, Richthofen began as an observer and then as a gunner in a two-man ship, flying different aircraft. The role of the fighter aircraft grew quickly with necessity and technology, and after a year or so the Baron started using single-seat fighters and eventually was paired with the Albatross, in which he had so much success. The fighter’s role then was to patrol the front lines, not to penetrate enemy airspace seeking targets behind the lines, not to strafe the ground.
One of the great predicaments of the war that the film brings out is the inconsistency of airplane pilots’ view of themselves as gentlemen fliers, chivalrous knights of the air and heroic gods to their public in a war that knew no boundaries. Richthofen was a child of the Prussian nobility and as such he had choices that the average infantryman did not. The mechanization of World War I meant that it was not a glorious thing, like how the Red Baron imagined it. It was the lowest that men could fall to.
“Our task is to bring down aeroplanes, not men. So, stop firing when your opponent’s falling. Gentlemen, we are sportsmen, not butchers.”