Wings (Paramount, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I raided the DVD backlog for a movie to show Charles and I and found it in Wings, the 1927 Paramount mega-production about the air war in World War I that’s often referred to as the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was and it wasn’t: in that first year of the awards the Academy actually designated two best pictures, “Best Production” and “Most Artistic Quality of Production.” Wings won for Best Production and F. W. Murnau’s romantic masterpiece Sunrise won for Most Artistic Quality of Production. Though it was only that first year that the Academy gave out that dual award, it’s a practice I frankly wish they would return to: that way Black Panther, a cinematic masterpiece that transcended its comic-book superhero origins and offered Black characters of real agency and power in a story written and directed by African-Americans, could have won Best Production and Green Book, a good movie but one stuck in Hollywood’s usual patronizing attitude towards Black characters -- that they’re there only to bring about the moral redemption of the white characters -- could have been acknowledged with Most Artistic Quality of Production. (This would also improve the Academy’s TV ratings because it would mean the Best Production candidates would be big, commercial films large audiences have actually seen: the Academy was trying to address this conundrum when it briefly floated the idea of giving an award for “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film” before public ridicule led them to abandon it. The problem is that there are all too few films being made that combine commercial appeal and artistic quality the way Black Panther did.)

As a movie -- as the film generally acknowledged as the first Academy Award winner and the only silent film to win (unless you count The Artist, which might be considered a “neo-silent”), Wings remains an impressive movie, though if it had had to go head-to-head with Sunrise for a single Best Picture title I’d have been incensed if it had won (it would have gone on the list of Academy boners along with giving How Green Was My Valley best picture over Citizen Kane, the non-nomination of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dreamgirls, and -- I hate to keep harping on this -- Green Book over Black Panther), and its debt to King Vidor’s World War I movie The Big Parade (which dealt with the infantry rather than the air corps but still strongly, shall we say, influenced the whole conception and many of the specific scenes of Wings) is quite obvious. The most interesting fact about Wings -- aside from the obvious one that it was the blockbuster success of The Big Parade (the second most popular film of the silent era, after The Birth of a Nation) that got it green-lighted in the first place -- was that its director, William Wellman, and its writer, John Monk Saunders, had both participated in the World War I air war. Wellman had been a member of the Lafayette Escadrille, the squadron of U.S. pilots who volunteered to fly for France well before the Americans formally entered the war. Indeed, it had been his lifelong dream to make a film about the Lafayette Escadrille -- and he finally got the green light from Jack Warner in 1958, though it came with a condition -- he had to use Tab Hunter as the lead -- which turned him off big-time.

Wings is a 2 ½-hour spectacle that rather uneasily combines a pre-war prologue, a post-war epilogue, a lot of romantic intrigue and the aviation action scenes that are, predictably, the film’s highlight. (In 1930 John Monk Saunders would write a far better World War I aviation script, The Dawn Patrol, which would leave out women altogether and bring a refreshingly mordant sensibility and total lack of sentimentality to the basic situation.) The writing credits for Wings are typically convoluted for a silent film: Saunders gets credit for the story, Hope Loring and future producer Louis B,. Lighton for “screenplay” (which in the pre-sound days was usually called “continuity”: it took the original story, broke it down into individual scenes and specified what would be happening on screen in each scene), and Julian Johnson wrote the intertitles that gave the dialogue as well as the story background. (Intertitles as exposition lingered on well into the sound era; Gone with the Wind is full of them, and Johnson’s expository titles in Wings are just as fustian and overwrought as Ben Hecht’s for Gone with the Wind.) The central characters in Wings are small-town working-class boy Jack Powell (Charles “Buddy” Rogers), upper-class kid Dick Armstrong (Richard Arlen) and the women they both love. Mary Preston (Clara Bow, top-billed for some reason even though she has precious little to do and she’s not showcased effectively -- Bow’s career was ruined by all the B.S. made up about her by her personal assistant, Daisy DeVoe, after Bow caught her embezzling and fired her, which portrayed her as an insane nymphomaniac, and her modern reputation is handicapped by the loss of quite a few of her films; but when I saw her next-to-last movie, Call Her Savage, made in 1932 and one of the unsung masterpieces of the so-called “pre-Code” era, my regard for her as an actress shot up several notches) is Jack’s class-peer girlfriend, but Jack really has the hots for upper-class woman Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston, who replaced Mildred Davis as Harold Lloyd’s leading lady when Davis quit to become Mrs. Harold Lloyd for real), who in turn only loves her class-peer Dave.

There’s a business about a locket with her picture in it that Sylvia meant to give to Dave but gave to Jack by mistake -- fueling his unrequited crush on her -- as well as a miniature teddy bear Dave had as a baby, which his parents give to him to take into the war as a good-luck charm. Then the U.S. enters World War I and Jack and Dave both enlist in the Army Air Corps, and director Wellman shows their training in great detail, including the contraptions that are essentially cockpits suspended in gimbals to give the would-be pilots the sensation of flying before they actually get into the air. Along the way Jack and Dave end up rooming with Cadet White (a young but already recognizable Gary Cooper), who bites off a bit of a chocolate bar, offers some to Jack and Dave, then goes up for a flight to demonstrate figure-eight turns, but ends up crashing and being killed. The scene was obviously put in there to give Jack and Dave a heads-up about the dangers they’re going to face, but it also throws the rest of the movie out of balance because Cooper is so much stronger a screen presence than either of the leads and I spent much of the rest of the movie thinking how much better the film would have been with Cooper playing Buddy Rogers’ part. (Buddy Rogers became Mary Pickford’s third husband after her divorce from Douglas Fairbanks, and in the early 1930’s left acting to become a bandleader, famous for his trademark of lining up several brass instruments on a table and playing each one in turn. Gene Krupa got stuck as the drummer in Rogers’ band for a while until Benny Goodman hired him and launched him on his star career. Richard Arlen adapted successfully to sound films and had a long and successful career without achieving the exalted superstar heights of Gary Cooper’s.)

The big attractions of the film are the two action set-pieces, at the end of the first half in which Our Heroes successfully shoot down a German Gotha bomber that’s launching an air attack on the town where they’re billeted; and a final climax showing the so-called “Big Push” -- the major offensive that finally won the war for the Allies after four years of stalemate (and an earlier “Big Push” led by German general Erich Ludendorff that almost won the war for them). Jack and Dave are assigned to take out two huge German observation balloons that are reporting the positions of the Allied forces, and Dave gets shot down but survives, Trapped behind German lines, he escapes by stealing a German plane and attempting to fly it back to the Allied lines -- but Jack, seeing only the German insignia on the plane and not the identity of its pilot, shoots it down in what today would be called “friendly fire.” The action scenes in Wings are beautifully staged but suffer from too many titles -- one would have thought Wellman could have trusted the audience to figure out when a pilot’s machine gun had jammed, or when his oil line was shot out, rendering his engine inoperative, without Johnson’s titles explaining these things to us. (But then Wings was almost certainly the first dramatic film made about aerial combat, and these scenes were far less familiar to modern audiences than they are today, in which virtually all air-war movies follow the same basic plot devices and trajectories and only the hardware and technology have changed.)

In between there’s a scene at the Folies-Bergere in Paris where the pilots have gone for leave and are making whoopee with the French women (Charles noted that at least one of the couples glimpsed in this famously racy establishment were Lesbians) and Clara Bow, who’s in France as a volunteer with the Women’s Motor Corps, needs to pull Jack and Dave from their champagne-soaked revels (there’s an excessively campy device in which animated bubbles pour forth from the bottles, the characters’ lips and normally uncarbonated inanimate objects, and the soundtrack -- a modern re-recording of the original score George Zamencik assembled for the film to be played live as it was shown -- repeats ad nauseam the song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” reused by Wellman to far better dramatic effect in his 1931 gangster film The Public Enemy), and Bow puts on one of the dresses of the Folies dancers but is caught in Jack’s bedroom out of uniform and fired from the Motor Corps, not to be seen again until the postwar epilogue in which she and Jack finally get together after his return and Dave’s death.

Wings is a technically accomplished film that shows off how good the late silents really were -- there are some spectacular moving-camera shots of the type that virtually disappeared from films in the early sound era, which immobilized the camera in giant soundproof booths; one critic during the early transition wondered why a silent camera could encompass mountains, valleys and rivers while a sound camera was helpless in the face of 12 chorus girls) -- though it’s simply not as good a movie as The Big Parade or Sunrise. At least the acting is relatively naturalistic, though Rogers is a bit too weak for his part and Bow is barely used at all despite her status on top of the cast list, and the action scenes are beautifully staged and have the ring of truth about them. Incidentally, Wings contains a scene in which a pilot is shot in mid-air and coughs up blood as he dies; two years later Howard Hughes used a similar scene in his World War I aviation epic Hell’s Angels (which he shot silent and then reshot as a talkie), and in 1930 Hughes threatened to sue director Howard Hawks for plagiarism for a scene in The Dawn Patrol in which a pilot coughs up blood as he’s shot in mid-air. Hawks replied, “You’re making movies for a hobby. I’m making them for a living. My scene stays in.” Hawks could have easily defended himself by accusing Hughes of plagiarizing the scene, since it appears in Wings, and Wings and The Dawn Patrol were both written by John Monk Saunders.