Berlin - A German film-premiere audience has given a cool reception to The Red Baron, a movie released this week which celebrates the exploits of German First World War flying ace Manfred von Richthofen. In a nation with an abiding revulsion for war and a preference for its war movies being gloomy, the controversially upbeat film obtained no public funding and had to rely on private German investors, the leading man, Matthias Schweighoefer, said.
The film goes on general German release on April 10.
German commentators have little sympathy for the British and US esteem of Richthofen as a fair and honourable opponent.
After its Monday evening premiere in Berlin, the applause was conspicuously thin for a movie that shows the baron and his aristocratic chums returning to base after dogfights saying, "Boy, that was fun!"
One member of the audience complained that the film's second half, in which the baron, who has been treating war as a sporting match, finds his sensitive side and realizes that war is evil, was not dramatically credible.
"It isn't just an anti-war film. It's an action drama," said Schweighoefer, 27, in defence of the stirring battle scenes.
The German ace, who flew a red-painted Fokker triplane, shot down 80 Allied aircraft during the First World War before he himself was downed in combat in 1918 by Canadian pilot Roy Brown and killed.
Brown is played in the film by British actor Joseph Fiennes, who excused himself from the Monday premiere giving private reasons.
Schweighoefer said he gave a private screening several weeks ago to US star Tom Cruise who was in Berlin to make Valkyrie, a movie about a German officer who vainly tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
"We watched it together, and afterwards he jumped up and said, 'I'm amazed that you made a film like this in Germany'," the actor recalled.
"There are strong voices in Germany that still say we should not be doing this," Nikolai Muellerschoen, who wrote and directed the film, was quoted saying in the run-up to The Red Baron release.
Cruise's movie, the first made in Germany to portray a Second World War German officer as a hero, will portray a true-life 1944 plot by another aristocratic German, Count Claus von Stauffenberg.
