WINGS

My New Year’s commitment to seeing all previously unviewed Oscar-winning Best Pictures continues. I dove into this one tremulously. I worried I might lose focus given it is a silent film almost 2 ½ hours long. My unease was completely assuaged within mere minutes, and I came out on the other side of this one having a great appreciation for the movie. Awarded the very first Oscar for Best Picture in 1928 (the only silent film to ever garner this achievement), was the movie Wings.

Though advertising for the film heavily promotes Clara Bow, her role is merely a supporting one. She was given hefty promotion because she was a top box office star of the decade. The movie actually revolves around two World War I flying aces. Jack Powell (Buddy Rogers) is the all-American boy next door and David Armstrong (Richard Arlen) is the son of a well-to-do family. Both young men reside in the same town, and both are in love with the same woman, Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston). Though they are rivals for her affection, once enlisted and trained as aviators for the U.S. military’s World War I efforts, they quickly become best friends. The film follows their story from enlistment through returning home.

The film may be almost 100 years old, and sure it can sometimes be melodramatic in its visual presentation (an overcompensation for lack of dialogue), but the story is solid, and the cinematography is beyond masterful, even by today’s standards. The massive number of extras as background characters was unexpected but appreciated for credibility.  With that said, the story can often be overrun by the visual magic that director William Wellman seemed sometimes a little overly focused on. Several times where film manipulation is engaged (the red flames of aerial artillery and downed planes against the B&W film, and the imaginary floating champagne bubbles seen by a drunken Jack) the scenes begin to feel overly elongated, forsaking the story for effect. But when I tried to imagine how innovative these techniques would have been to an audience member a century ago, this is easily forgiven. Roy Pomeroy, the film’s special effects artist, was also an Oscar recipient for his work on this film. And I would be remiss not to mention the incredible score that for 144 unbroken minutes, stimulates the mood and pace of all the unfolding events.

Of special note is the fact that there are several occurrences in the film that remind a viewer of today that this film was created before the restrictive Hays Code was forced upon the motion picture industry in order to assure the public be saved from “morally questionable” material. About 10 minutes in, as Jack and David are registering for service, there are three men in the background being given their physicals, sans clothes. Later in the film as the camera pans through a French cabaret-style nightclub, the camera passes a table of two who are clearly a lesbian couple. Soon after, Clara Bow’s character Mary is intruded upon in her hotel room as she is changing clothes. One of her breasts can be seen for less than a second. These were all real moments, not salacious, and they only enhanced the believability of the overall movie. It’s amusing now because had the Hays Code never been enacted, these scenes would not have registered as being particularly noticeable.

For me, Wings was an extremely enjoyable step back in time.