THE BLUE MAX **

Another war film with a largely international cast, (mostly British with an American lead and a Swiss-born leading lady), playing at being Germans in the closing year of the First World War with most of them spoiling for "The Blue Max", the highest honour Germany could give. George Peppard is the new boy off the flying blocks, a working-class lad, now an officer if not quite a gentleman and his comrades in the air include Derren Nesbitt, Karl Michael Vogler and Jeremy Kemp, once of 'Z-Cars' fame and probably giving the best performance in the picture. James Mason is an upper-crust baron and general and Ursula Andress is his sexy, younger wife whom Peppard beds. Of course, nobody goes to a picture like "The Blue Max" for the bedroom antics or for the soap opera but for the flying sequences which are superb and plentiful. The workmanlike director was John Guillermin.