Wings

Previous Gary Cooper

Next Gary Cooper

Buy This Item Wings by Paramount  Available from Amazon  $14.95  on 8-28-2008     <I>Wings</I>, the first movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture and the only silent film to win, is still remarkably enjoyable to watch. The story is a fairly conventional one--two flyboys, both in love with the same girl, go off to fight World War I, and male bonding and heartbreak ensue. It's a perfectly serviceable plot, except for the key logical flaw that both young men have inexplicably fallen in love with the boring girl down the street and have somehow failed to notice that Clara Bow is the girl next door. Both male leads really flew their airplanes, and the dogfight footage is still spectacular. The main reason to watch <i>Wings</i>, though, is to see the difference between an actor and a movie star. There are many actors in the film, but only two movie stars. Clara Bow is a treat to watch every minute she's on screen, and young Gary Cooper in a tiny role nearly walks away with the movie, mostly by standing there and looking dreamy. It's well worth sitting through a little cheesy organ music for a movie this much fun. <I>--Ali Davis</I> Reader Reviews Wings (William Wellman, 1927) That Wings, the first film ever to receive what we now know as the Best Picture Academy Award, went so long without any sort of domestic home video release is confusing, to say the least. It still, to this day, has not been afforded the treatment such a film rightly commands; as I write this, a new version is on the horizon, but no idea what it will encompass as yet. Thank heaven for TCM and their seeming willingness to settle for showing great films from crappy bootleg imports; that way some of us who otherwise wouldn't at least have the chance to see some neglected classics. Wings takes place during World War I (specifically, around the time of the Big Push; the latter half of the movie takes place during that operation). It concerns Jack Powell (Charles Rogers, early in a career that spanned thirty years) and David Armstrong (Richard Arlen; if you've seen more than, say, ten films made in America before 1960, you've probably run across him at some point in his 175-movie career). Both are from the same hometown, and both are in love with the same girl, Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston, who unlike the boys was nearing the end of her film career; she made her last picture just four years later). Adding to the mess is Mary (Clara Bow), Jack's next door neighbor, who's in love with him. Jack and David go off to war, resenting one another over Sylvia; as time goes on, however, the two of them become the best of friends as they go through flight school, and then overseas to fight the Germans in contested French territory. Among the folks they meet: their first bunkmate, Cadet White-- Gary Cooper in one of his earliest credited roles, the one that made him a star. While Wings is first and foremost an action flick, in which men are men, women are women, and things blow up, it would certainly be an error to lump it in with the weaker Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies that have defined how we think of the action movie since 1980 or thereabouts. Loring and Lighton's script (their final collaborative effort, as Louis Lighton went on to produce full-time after Wings; Hope Loring gave up the writing business a few years afterward) is just as long on characterization as it is on plot, and even the minor characters, such as White or the comic-relief character Herman Schwimpf (El Brendel), are well-realized and add a great deal to the movie. Perhaps most telling is the leader of the German squadron who are set up as Jack and David's nemeses (Carl von Haartman); in a modern action flick, he'd be, at best, a cardboard cutout, despite being onscreen almost as much as the hero. Here, he gets very little screen time, but what he does get is interesting; we get to know him through his sense of honor as much as through his accuracy with a machine gun. Imagine something like that in a modern action movie. Roy Pomeroy's special effects deservedly won the film its other Oscar, and even today in the age of CGI they're quite impressive. (This is, of course, pre-code days, so when people get shot, chocolate syrup appears. And while Clara bow covering her torso-- badly-- with only a sheet is not an effect, it's pretty durned special.) I grant you that Wellman may have been a little overly fond of them himself-- there are at least two scenes of planes spiralling down to their inevitable crashes that could have been a minute shorter apiece (in fact, it may be the same piece of film reused)-- but that's a minor thing. This is a wonderfully put-together movie, and deserves to be rediscovered as so many silent films these days are. ****

Wings Available from Amazon Price: $14.95 Updated on 8-28-2008.

SPONSORED LINKS