Roy Brown, the Canadian fighter pilot at the centre of a long-running historical mystery over who shot down the Red Baron, is set to get some high-profile credit for the controversial kill in a big-budget biopic about Germany's famed First World War flying ace.
Movie insiders in Europe and the U.S. are reporting this week that British actor Joseph Fiennes — who has portrayed playwright William Shakespeare and Protestant revolutionary Martin Luther in two of his most notable roles — will play Brown in a cinematic retelling of events leading to the April 1918 air battle that finally ended Manfred von Richthofen's mastery of the skies over war-torn Europe.
Brown's claims to have felled the Red Baron went largely unchallenged before his own death in 1944. But in recent years, historians, television documentary makers and even forensic scientists have re-examined and reconstructed the fateful engagement near the French village of Vaux-sur-Somme, raising questions about whether the Canadian pilot, an Australian gunner on the ground or other Allied servicemen deserve the glory for taking out the dreaded baron.
Scholarly nuance is sure to take a back seat in the film version of the deadly dogfight 88 years ago. And with the hunky Fiennes playing Brown, a flickering star of Canadian military history appears headed for some big-screen limelight.
Variety and other movie-news sources have said German director Niki Muellerschoen has written his own screenplay and that Der Rote Baron (The Red Baron) is now being filmed in Prague.
Fiennes, best known for playing the young Bard in Shakespeare in Love, is to star alongside German actor Matthias Schweighofer (the baron) in a story said to combine genuine history with invented plot twists, such as von Richthofen's romance with a nurse played by Lena Headey as well as the German pilot's supposed moral struggle with war and his own unrivalled skill at killing enemies.
Von Richthofen is believed to have destroyed more than 70 Allied warplanes during the war, far more than any pilot on either side of the 1914-18 conflict.
But the baron's reign of terror came to an end on April 21, 1918, after he recklessly pursued Canadian pilot Wilfred "Wop" May behind enemy lines.
That's when Brown, a native of the Ottawa-area village Carleton Place, Ont., zeroed in on von Richthofen in a bid to rescue his Canadian comrade.
Shots fired by Brown came at about the same time a group of Australian machine-gunners — including one named Snowy Evans — turned their weapons on the German ace, whose plane soon plunged into a field of sugar beets.
The bullet that brought down the Red Baron struck him near the armpit and ripped through his chest. On the verge of death, he was said to have muttered "alles kaput" as Allied troops arrived at the site of his wrecked plane.
The 25-year-old pilot's remarkable record of gallantry led even Brown to remark of von Richthofen's death: "If he had been my dearest friend, I could not have felt greater sorrow."
But controversy has raged ever since over whether it was Brown, or Evans, or someone else who brought down the mighty Baron.
Brown's combat report claiming to have sent von Richthofen's plane "vertical" with a burst of gunfire was backed by the Royal Air Force. Evans and two other Australian gunners also claimed to have downed the German fighter, but a British commander concluded in 1918 there wasn't enough evidence to officially credit anyone with the historic kill.
In 2003, a U.S. Discovery Channel documentary revisited the case and concluded it was Evans, not Brown, who’d fired the fatal shot.
Historians disputed the firmness of the conclusion, arguing that one of several Commonwealth combatants — including Brown — might have killed the Red Baron, but that available evidence is inconclusive.
"If scientists decide that Brown didn't do the final kill, he certainly saved the life of his mate (Wop May)," Canadian War Museum historian Tim Cook said at the time. "The Red Baron was on his tail and things were looking very desperate. Roy Brown did swoop down and engage the Red Baron, in itself a pretty dangerous thing to do."
In 2004, two U.S. scientists published a paper arguing that by 1918 von Richthofen was so brain-damaged from a previous wound he was virtually a sitting duck for Brown or whoever fired the fatal rounds at Vaux-sur-Somme.
The study led by a University of Missouri neuropsychologist concluded that a head injury suffered by von Richthofen in July 1917 left the German pilot with a condition known as "target fixation" and unable to rationally recognize mortal danger.
"He clearly should not have been flying," the scientists wrote. "Perhaps credit for his being shot down (in April 1918) should have been given to that machine-gunner nine months before whose lucky shot creased the Baron's skull."
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