Wings (1927)

Director: William A. Wellman                              Writer: Hope Loring & Louis D. Lighton
Film Score: J.S. Zamecnik                                Cinematography: Harry Perry
Starring: Clara Bow, Charles Rogers, Richard Arlen & Jobyna Ralston

Wings is typically considered the very first film to win an academy award for best motion picture in 1929, when in fact it shared honors with F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, also from 1927. That subsequent lists of Oscar winners have excluded Sunrise, even though the first awards were technically for two years, both 1927 and 1928, is unfortunate, especially given the fact that Murnau’s film is clearly the superior film. But while Wings won the award for “Outstanding Picture Production” and Sunrise won for “Unique and Artistic Production” the academy decided the following year to combine the categories and named Wings as the retroactive winner of best overall picture. What's so exasperating is that neither has to be left out, and should both be recognized equally, especially since the first awards were for two years.

The first half of the film is fairly standard Hollywood fare for silent pictures of the day. Production values are good and there is some very nice moving camera work for Harry Perry that holds interest. Clara Bow’s screen work, while not out of the norm for acting at that time, seems to be more animated than necessary and feels a bit over exaggerated. Fortunately, it’s a small role. Where the film really takes off is in the second half with the aerial photography, which is thrilling to watch even in today’s film world of CGI special effects. I would argue it’s almost more thrilling because of that. With the exception of some hand-drawn flames on the long shots as planes fall to their doom, there are no special effects at all. The plane crashes are obviously done on the ground, but the rest of it is the real thing, and the open-air cockpits and the banks of clouds in the background make for some tremendous battle scenes. The plot was no doubt the inspiration for the film Pearl Harbor, which is ironic considering how much special effects work went into the later film.

The story itself is fairly pedestrian: two pilots from a small town are in love with the same girl. Clara Bow is the odd girl out, so to speak, as her love interest is still smitten with the more cosmopolitan girlfriend of the richest boy in town. Both the men join the air force and become friends, and fight in France during the First World War. During their training they meet a young Gary Cooper. What’s interesting is how many sources claim that Wings launched the career of Gary Cooper, which is hard to believe considering he’s on the screen for less than two minutes. I was actually looking forward to seeing him in the film, but he dies in an off-screen plane crash and that’s it. Overall, Wings is a solid production, a good silent film with an excellent recreation of First World War battlefields by William Wellman who was a veteran of the war. Whether or not it was worthy of an Oscar award, considering all of the films to choose from at the end of the classic era of silent film in 1927 and 1928--including Sunrise--is debatable.