The silent-era Wings is not a subtle film. Director William A. Wellman’s action-packed World War One tale of loyalty, love and war is also, at just short of two-and-a-half hours, long. At the time of its release in 1927, the film news bulletin Movie Time News declared it “the spectacular epic of the year, the national box office sensation of 1927”. In 1929 it became the first film to pick up an Oscar for Best Picture, at the first Academy Awards ceremony.
As one of the extras on this new edition makes clear, the path which led to Wellman helming the film was collaborative and needed to be paved with money. Masses of it. Funds were sought from America’s War Department. A US general decided it would be a good for the country and its forces to support the film. Wings was propaganda (pictured below, Charles “Buddy” Rogers, Clara Bow and Richard Arlen in a promotional shot for Wings).
Although ostensibly the story – and it is gripping viewing – of two small-town friends who go off to war and the girl who follows them to France, it was also the first film spectacularly to capture scenes of planes in aerial combat. These lengthy set pieces dominate. Buddy (Richard Arlen) and Jack (Charles “Buddy” Rogers) are the friends whose fate is intertwined. Their destiny is ultimately astonishing. As Mary Preston, cutesy Clara Bow is the love-fixated girl on their trail. She had been brought on board for the film before the rest of the cast was signed. She was the star name, although Arlen, Rogers, the aerial scenes, the thousands of extras and the war scenes dominate. France’s battlefields and villages, and the war’s aerodromes, were built in San Antonio, Texas. The aerial scenes were actually as dangerous to make as real war-time aerobatics. A couple of blink-and-miss them scenes are diverting: a pair of lesbians seen in passing at a Paris night spot; and Bow’s bared breasts.
This extraordinary film is presented in an exemplary manner. As is often the case with restored early 20th-century films, it looks better than it must have at the time of its release. The contrast is bold. The tones are strong. The restoration is investigated in another of the extras. There are two versions of the film itself: one with the original accompanying score, another with a later score. The fat booklet includes a fascinating 1978 interview with Wellman and an extract from his autobiography. The introductory essay, with its talk of shots being like “selfies”, sometimes spills into the fatuous (pictured left, one of the spectacular French battlefield scenes created in Texas for Wings).
Two years after the release of Wings, America entered The Great Depression. The film’s almost jingoistic triumphalism is born of an era when mastery of the world seemed assured. In many ways, Wings prefigures Gone With the Wind. The intertitles scream of “the breathless hazards in the skies”. Retreating Germans are mown down at the film’s climax. Wings is a blood-and-thunder epic. But it is much more than that.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for the restored release of Wings
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