Wings 1927/8

The Film:

Clara and Gary getting a much better billing
than their screentime warrants!

The film that is officially recognised as the first Best Picture winner. It's a two hour epic war film set in the First World War - which was only a decade before the film was made!

It is most notable for the spectacular dogfight scenes which really are quite extraordinary, especially considering the technical limitations of the time. Most of the people flying the planes had actually seen action in the war which adds a strong touch of authenticity to the whole thing. The Director, William A Wellman, based the film on his own experiences on the front line.

There were thousands of extras and a budget of about $2 million - and you can see all of this up on the screen. There's also the blatantly box office chasing casting of the magnificent (and very under-used) Clara Bow, as well as one of the earliest examples of product placement when it is clearly revealed that Gary Cooper's last bit of chow was made by Hershey.


The Ceremony:

The Academy Dinner (with Awards thrown in as an added extra!)

May 16th 1929 at Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel

It couldn't be further from the 89th Awards this year. It was a small, private dinner with 270 guests and a ceremony that lasted about 15 minutes. The winners were informed months in advance that they had won. There were only twelve categories - and many of them (such as the Acting awards) didn't specify a particular film but rather gave the award for a general body of work.

Other Notable Winners That Night:

The other famous winner of the night was Sunrise, which we watched last week. There were also two best directors - Lewis Milestone for "Two Arabian Knights" won the comedy award and Frank Borzage won the dramatic award for 7th Heaven. I know very little about either of these films, but apparently they are both still out there somewhere.

Emil Jannings won Best Actor and Janet Gaynor (more about her in a bit....) won Best Actress. Good bits of information to know for Pub Quizzes or Pointless endgames!

Out of the twelve awards given, Sunrise and 7th Heaven took three each (sort of, because they both counted for Janet Gaynor who won her award for starring in both of them!)


What We Could/Should Have Been Watching:

The other two nominees in this category were 7th Heaven (which won Best Director, Best Actress and Best Screenwriter) and The Racket (a controversial Chicago crime movie which was long thought lost until one surviving copy was found in Howard Hughes' collection - it's currently a museum piece only).

Without having seen the other two pictures, I'm still fairly confident that what we watched was more than worthy of its award!


Our Verdict:

I'd been meaning to watch Wings for years - for much the same reasons as I've seen Birth of a Nation and Battleship Potemkin. It's one of those classics of film history! However, the length of it and the subject matter has always put me off. I wasn't that keen on the idea of watching a load of planes silently flying around and shooting at each other for two hours, however technically brilliant they were.

I was wrong. The film was so much more than that. And it was great fun!

Dogfight!

So - let's start with the dogfights. There are about four key set pieces interspersed throughout the film and they really are quite stunning. It's hard to get your head around the idea that they are recreating events from only ten years previously and to really put into context the technical limitations of the time. They hadn't really worked out how to synchronise sound and film yet, and their movie cameras will have been great big cumbersome things with a limited supply of electricity. And yet Wellman managed to both choreograph and film some technically brilliant sequences. Andy pointed out that the first big fight looked like it was almost scene for scene the same as the battle at the end of the first Star Wars film. A little googling reveals that George Lucas used scenes from Wings as placeholders when filming his battle scenes! The version we had also had most of the gunfire and some of the crash fires coloured in, which was a nice historical touch.

Maverick and Goose - oops, sorry, Jack and David!

The dogfights were only part of the film. There is also what turns out to be a really rather good story attached to it involving a love triangle, an unrequited admirer and what turns out to be a strong and tragic buddy relationship (one of the many reasons I could find in the film for why Top Gun is a derivative pile of nonsense!). Jack and David go from love rivals and enemies to flying partners and friends - and it all ends in tears with a beautifully tender (and quite shocking for the time) fraternal kiss.

NB: Sorry, not sorry for the slight spoiler there - the story has been copied so many times that if you didn't see that one coming you'll probably need spoilers!

Gary's off for some figure eights before chow - it's going
to end in tears!

 The film also introduces the world to Gary Cooper. He's only in it for about three or four minutes, being half-friendly half-macho, but he makes a big impression and gets himself noticed enough to secure his film career (and two future Best Actor Oscars!). He's not interested in the silly superstitions that Jack and David has, and he won't take any lucky charms with him when he flies. And then he just nips out for a bit of practice before dinner - and I don't need to tell you the rest, do I?

Gary Cooper also made quite an impression in other ways - particularly on Clara Bow, with whom he had quite a steamy affair (apparently!) during filming. And who can blame either of them!

Clara in a very revealing pre-Hayes Code moment

Clara Bow was very clearly hired because her name on the poster was going to mean big Box Office returns. She said as much herself, and the script really doesn't make enough of her. She plays Jack's unrequited love interest who also joins the war effort and, among other things, rescues Jack from the excesses of Paris so that he turns up for duty on time. She plays her part well (although the make up artist could have been a bit more careful with her decidedly not "on fleek" eyebrows which distracted me several times) but they run out of things to do with her halfway through the film and then she disappears until the end. She does show rather more flesh than the Hays Code (which came in a couple of years later) would approve of and adds humour and heart to the story. It's a shame she didn't have a bit more to do!

Bubbles!!

 In terms of humour (and pre-Hays Code shenanigans) there is a technically clever scene where Jack gets rather drunk on champagne in Paris and can see bubbles coming out of everything - including Clara and another female rival when he shakes them! The bubbles are superimposed on the film really cleverly, especially the big bubble that covers Jack's face until he pops it!

If your name's Herman and you sound German but you want to
fight for Uncle Sam, you'd better get yourself one of these!

And there are also some great comic moments near the beginning of the film where they are signing up for training and a man of German origin, called Herman (of course!) manages to convince the officers that he is American through and through by showing off his rippling muscles and his Stars and Stripes tattoo! He doesn't fair too well in training (the wonderfully named Gunboat Smith plays a sergeant who really has it in for him) but he becomes an engineer and does his bit.

This sort of leads me on to my last point - one that Andy made. This film is so very clearly not anti-German. The German Major plays fair and any shots of his men in or out of their flying machines portray them as no different to our heroes. In this film it is War itself that is the bad guy and there are no real winners or losers, just casualties. I don't know if this is true of other such war films which were made before the Nazis came along - although I kind of suspect it might be. We've got "All Quiet On The Western Front" coming up in a couple of weeks, so I'll have to see.

Overall, we really enjoyed Wings. It deserved its Oscar (although Sunrise deserved one too!) and really should be watched by more people. More than anything else it shows that a good script, good casting, great directing and fearless stuntmen completely wipe the floor with the formulaic nonsense that Tom Cruise strutted around in nearly sixty years later!

Clara playing gooseberry (not really....)