The Blue Max

Guillermin has made rather a career of the sort of film which is remembered for its special effects and pyrotechnical action sequences, usually in a context of unashamed banality. The Blue Max deserves plaudits for its WWI dogfight sequences, but the human drama (overweeningly ambitious pilot scuppers himself by playing footsy with his superior's wife) never gets off the ground, despite the novelty of its involving German airmen (on which score it was later wiped out of the skies by Roger Corman's The Red Baron).