Fantastic!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

The flying sequences in this film are authentic, which is the best thing going here, we see real men in the aircraft in the AIR and not on a blue screen set, as in THE BLUE MAX from which this film has it's roots and where most of the aircraft came from. Since the aircraft were available from the latter, the complaints about vintage aircraft being out of time-sync are valid, but given the budget ... you make do with what you have. Case closed here.THE BLUE MAX had decent dogfights, but blue screen as above so here the combat sequences are better. THE GREAT WALDO PEPPER also had real IN THE AIR footage of both pilots and aircraft, certain a fine pseudo-dogfight at the end of it.DARLING LILI I have never seen much of so I will refrain, though more BLUE MAX aircraft once again.Now we have the CGI films such as THE RED BARON and FLYBOYS, both of which show great action, totally faked and also totally way too fast. Watch the speed and action of these earlier films and you sense that these old planes did not move THAT FAST as these two films show them. Great stuff, but totally fake.Give me real any day of the week. For this film and THE BLUE MAX, Enjoy the dogfights, tolerate the acting and have good time.

Took a chance to see if perhaps a really good WWI film had slipped my notice--this isn't it. John Phillip Law and Don Stroud are both stiff in their acting and miscast for their roles. The dialogue is dumb or non-existent; the flying sequences are okay but pretty repetitive. Compared to the terrific "Blue Max" this movie should never have been made. Watch George Peppard,James Mason, and Usula Andress in the BM and you get why that movie is one of the best war films ever made and this isn't. Recently released on DVD Richtofen and Brown is presented as some great 'lost classic' from the 70's, I resold mine the day after I bought it. Don't waste your time or $.

Given the very negative comments by others on IMDB about this film, I wasn't really expecting much, especially given that it was directed by Roger Corman, who, whilst he certainly has his talents, would not really be expected to helm a period piece with high production values. Actually I found this film not at all bad. Certainly its narrative plays fast and loose with historical details. But it is quite authentic in many respects - the planes themselves, and the nature of air combat depicted, are reasonably accurate (better, for example, than the planes in The Blue Max, which often look like very thinly disguised Tiger Moths). And fair chunks of the dialogue seem to be taken almost directly from the writings of actual WW1 flyers. Even the rather melodramatic plot does have roots in historical truths, and functions well enough to engage the viewer's attention throughout. I'd say it's definitely worth a look, and compares surprisingly well with the generally much better regarded The Blue Max.

In a rare (and unfortunate) deviation from his horror genre, Roger Corman takes an unhistorical look at the life and death of Manfred von Richtofen. Little about this film is accurate, and I could go on at length about all the inaccuracies, but why bother. Corman tries to give us a glimps of things-to come in the next war when Hitler's chief henchman-in-training Herman Goring (who, by the way, was not a member of the Flying Circus until after the Red Baron was killed), played to the hilt by Barry Primus, turns his twin spandaus on some poor British Nuns serving as nurses while attacking a British airbase. Probably one of the worst movies about World War One aviation ever made. I would rather watch Darling ‘Lil, and that says a lot.