WINGS Movie Review
1927 William A. Wellman
The first aerial combat movie mapped out the territory for all that have followed, but it's far from the best. Like so many other works of the silent era, it's slow, and contemporary audiences will probably think that it's too soft and sentimental for its grim subject. Those flaws not withstanding, some of the flying sequences have an unvarnished realism that today's films can't touch
The first title card sets an idyllic scene: “Small town 1917—Youth and dreams of youth.”
Jack Powell (Charles “Buddy” Rogers) is the archetypal boy-next-door who tinkers with cars. Mary Preston (Clara Bow) is not the archetypal girl-next-door. She loves Jack, but he's stuck on Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston), a visiting city girl. So is David Armstrong (Richard Arlen), and Sylvia's stuck on him. But, through a series of improbable misunderstandings, Jack thinks that Sylvia loves him and pays no attention to Mary. As the next big title card puts it, “So Youth laughed and wept and lived its heedless hour, while over the world hung a cloud which spread and spread until its shadow fell in some degree on every living person—WAR! And Youth answered the challenge.”
David and the clueless Jack enlist in the Army Air Corps. During a brief interlude in basic training and flight school, they become friends and are sent to France. Mary, meanwhile, becomes an ambulance driver.
Once the film moves to France, it takes a two-sided approach to its subject. The air war is treated as a basically clean and chivalrous operation where pilots observe polite rules—letting an opponent fly away when he has empty machine guns, for example. The ground war is much more devastating and brutal. Director William Wellman, who had flown in the Lafayette Escadrille, makes the desolate trenches and battlefields appallingly real. There he also hints at the random destruction of The Great War. Several of the large-scale surface battle scenes are really more spectacular than their aerial counterparts, with tanks crushing machine gun nests and the like.
Unfortunately, that part of the film is marred by far too much comic relief, including Mary's incongruous adventures in Paris, which have a tacked-on feeling, and a seemingly endless drunken-leave sequence. That's a double shame because Clara Bow, the famous “It Girl,” is absolutely radiant. Her vitality and sex appeal could have been much more important to the story. Wellman is interested in the relationship between Jack and David.
Finally though, all flying movies have to do one thing. No matter what else, they've got to put you, the viewer, in the airplane, in the pilot's seat. Wings does—eventually. Footage filmed in the bomb bay of the huge twin engine German Gotha is just terrific. So is the balloon burning, and several fighter crashes are so impressively edited that they seem remarkably real. In the more involved dogfights, the use of title cards to explain the action is a problem, and the grand finale, where Jack virtually wins the war singlehandedly in his Spad, is a little hard to take.
Today, viewers who can overlook the dated elements will see an expensive studio production—winner of the first Best Picture Oscar—that uses its budget to create detailed images of war. If its depiction of the human element isn't as fully realized, well, the movies had to start somewhere.
Cast: Clara Bow (Mary Preston), Charles “Buddy” Rogers (John “Jack” Powell), Richard Arlen (David Armstrong), Gary Cooper (Cadet White), Jobyna Ralston (Sylvia Lewis), El Brendel (Herman Schwimpf), Richard Tucker (Air Commander), Henry B. Walthall (David's father), Roscoe Karns (Lt. Cameron), Gunboat Smith (The Sergeant), Julia Swayne Gordon (David's mother), Arlette Marchal (Celeste), Carl von Haartman (German officer), William A. Wellman (Doughboy); Written by: Hope Loring, John Monk Saunders, Louis D. Lighton; Cinematography by: Harry Perry; Music by: J.S. Zamecnik. Producer: Lucien Hubbard, Paramount Pictures. Awards: Academy Awards ‘27: Best Picture, National Film Registry ‘97. Running Time: 139 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta, LV.