The Blue Max (1966)

"I'm afraid it's rather a small medal, Willi, but it's the highest Germany can give..."

‘MIRACLES IN THE AIR! far from the mud and bayonets of no man's land...’

Just after Christmas 1972, I had my first operation. To remove a set of infected tonsils and adenoids. I was seven years old. And — excitement! There was a large television at the foot of my bed. Later, back at school, I wrote an essay on my hospital experience — from memory, actually a litany of television programmes and their times — a television timetable if you will, in the curious way that small children govern their daily routine by television programming (or most certainly used to). 5.30 The Magic Roundabout. Six o'clock, Time for Bed. "7.00 pm", I wrote in my childish hand. "Time for The Blue Max". And checking the BBC Genome (The Radio Times archive), I see that The Blue Max, was, indeed, broadcast on BBC 1 at 19.00hrs on Wednesday, 27th December, 1972. In the end, I only managed to watch about fifteen minutes before some officious nurse, a formidable 'Sister' (as they used to be called), bustled in and switched it off. But The Blue Max is most probably the first grown-up film I managed to watch by myself, and for that, I hold it in great affection. It may even be responsible for what you're now reading today.

‘… a crack fighter squadron in the Imperial German Air Service...’

I'm also interested in how the Edwardian Era and the First World War became a fashionable subject, if repackaged, for writers and filmmakers in the 1960s and 70s. I wrote about this in my post on Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), and I may well have touched on the subject in other posts, including The Railway Children (1970). A reader then left a perceptive comment pointing out that, actually, it was the Second World War which had the greater influence at the time — and of course, they are right up to a point: little boys (shorts, runny noses and muddied knees) playing at 'Spitfires', grandparent's tales of doodlebugs and land mines, Warlord comic ("for you ze war is over"); terrifying, shell-shocked schoolmasters with gammy legs, the 1970s British obsession with Colditz, endless re-runs of 1950s black and white war films, Dirk, Kenneth or Johnny Mills. Officer material. The Stiff Upper Lip.

But the First World War, and the years immediately preceding the First World War, became, in the 1960s, an appropriate period setting for television and cinema. Production designers had a thing about flying machines, German brass bands and spiked helmets. Pickelhaube Chic. Remember Stop That Pigeon? Dastardly and Muttley in their Flying Machines (1969)? The Hanna-Barbera cartoon? Clearly based on Baron von Richthofen's Flying Circus. And then there was The Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965) with Gert Fröbe — yes, he of Goldfinger (1964) in a spiked helmet; and The Assassination Bureau (1969), and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) starring Fröbe (again), Neuschwanstein Castle and a Zeppelin. Plus Zeppelin (1971) itself, a late outbreak of the genre, starring Michael York in Sam Browne belt and kilt.

‘More Sixties dollybird than Edwardian Lady…’