A title card tells us we're in "A Small Town, 1917." Jack Powell (Charles "Buddy" Rogers, not to be confused with pro wrestler "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers...he was just 6 years old when this film was released) is a young man with a passion for cars. He even has named his favorite one the Shooting Star. Mary Preston (Clara Bow, the "It Girl") is both proverbially and literally the girl next door, and she has a serious crush on Powell. She even paints a shooting star onto his car and says to him that when a man sees a shooting star, it means he can kiss the girl he loves. Powell likes that idea, but as Preston closes her eyes and puckers up, he's gotten into the car and driven off to see the one he's smitten with, Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston, who's film career pretty much ended when talkies came into being due to her speaking with a lisp).
Sylvia is the daughter within the wealthiest family in town. She likes Jack, but she doesn't love him. Her heart belongs to David Armstrong (Richard Arlen, who first met Ralston during production of the film; the two wound up married in real life before the film's completion), and the two suitors know they're vying for her love. Jack asks Sylvia for a photo for him to take with him into the US Army Air Service (the modern-day Air Force's predecessor). She gives him one. As Jack leaves, David arrives. Sylvia reassures David (who is also enlisting) that she doesn't love Jack, she just didn't have the heart to refuse his request for a photo. David, meanwhile, heads off after saying goodbye to Sylvia, as well as his parents, who find that David is bringing his lucky little bear with him, the childhood toy that was always his favorite. David also bids adieu to the family dog, and my wife caught the trick Richard Arlen did to make sure the dog would kiss his face for the desired camera shot. Arlen snuck a piece of jerky to the dog. Jack returns home to say goodbye as well to his family, and to Mary, who also gives him a photo.
The two rivals arrive at military training camp and wind up going at it rather heatedly during a boxing exercise that sees the entire rest of the camp circling around them like a crowd at the school playground. Both men pound the snot of one another until they both accept the fact that neither will quit. This winds up uniting them and they put their rivalry to rest, even sharing the same living quarters amongst others. One of those others is Cadet White (Gary Cooper, in what wound up his breakout role). Jack and David meet and chat up White one morning. They discuss the war and their feelings on the dangers of flying. Regarding David's lucky bear, White says he doesn't believe in luck. When your time's up, your time's up. He then tells them he's going to get in some "figure eights before chow" and meet them later in the mess hall. Holy foreshadowing, Batman!
Yeah, you know what happened next. Jack and David hear a plane go overhead and then crash. Seconds later, White's stuff is being collected to return home. And just seconds after that, Jack and David are told to report for flying instruction. Jeez! No time to waste, even in a 141-minute film, apparently! I'll tell you what though, if someone told me to go report for flying instruction seventeen seconds after my tentmate just plummeted to his maker in one of those planes, I'd run so fast the other way that my army boots would leave skid marks.
At any rate, this film IS called Wings, so I guess it's about time we saw some type of them. Any type. Airplane. Bird. Paul McCartney's band. KFC. Philadelphia lacrosse players. Anything! Jack and David excel at their military training and even wind up getting into a dogfight above the clouds. They're victorious, feted with medals, and sent off to France upon graduation to fight the Germans in what we now know as World War I.
Cut to the evil Germans, who decide to wipe a small French town called Mervale off the map. We see a few German planes wheeled out of hangars and sent off into the air to fulfill their duties. Meanwhile, on the ground in this small French town, there's an ambulance being driven by none other than Mary Preston, who decided (I guess, since she's here and all) to enlist as well. Oh, this can only end badly...
The town is bombed. Mary hides under her ambulance as the buildings around her are hit. Fortunately, to the rescue come our two heroes in their magnificent flying machines! As the dogfight commences above, Mary and the other onlookers notice one of the Allied fighter planes has a shooting star logo on it. Guess who? Mary guesses who, and cheers him on. The good guys win, the bad guys lose. Jack and David go on leave for a few days and decide to whoop it up in Paris. But the big battle is about to happen, so Mary is sent off to retrieve Jack and others from Paris to alert them that all leaves are cancelled and they are report back to base. That winds up easier said than done, as Jack is drunk at a speakeasy (or whatever they were called over there back then) and fascinated with bubbles he's imagining from his drink and the lady he's with. Mary winds up winning Jack in the end and brings him to a hotel to sleep off his booze. While getting him into bed, she sees a locket around his neck. She gets excited and thinks that her photo is inside, but she opens it to find Sylvia's instead. Briefly angry, she debates tearing up the letter giving Jack his return orders so he'll be court-martialed, but gosh darn it, she loves the big lug and just can't do it. Unfortunately, a short time later some other soldiers barge into the room as she's changing from her borrowed dress back into her military uniform. (In a rather shocking pre-Code moment, there's a brief flash of Clara Bow's breasts as this happens.) She is ordered back home as Jack is returned to the base.
Back at the base, David reads a letter from Sylvia where she says that Jack has been sending letters to her still thinking she's in love with him, but she's still not, her heart belongs to David. Jack talks up Sylvia and David tries to tell him that she doesn't feel that way about him. They almost come to blows. David leaves, accidentally leaving his lucky bear behind. Uh-oh.
The Great Battle takes place in the skies. David's plane is shot down at one point over Axis territory and he's presumed dead. In reality, he survives the crash and ensuing gunfire. He comes upon a German base and steals a biplane to fly back to Allied lines. Jack, hellbent on avenging David's apparent death, sees the plane and shoots it down. He lands to collect a souvenir of his victory, but the owner of the land where the plane crashed tells Jack to come to the man's side as he doesn't have much life left. Jack horrifyingly discovers he shot down his friend. David explains what he was doing and insists to Jack not to blame himself, and that all is forgiven.
Upon returning home, Jack receives a hero's welcome complete with parade. Jack is sure to visit David's parents, where they return the lucky bear. He begs for their forgiveness for causing David's death, but the parents do not blame Jack for what happened, they blame the war in itself. Jack finally reunites with Mary and, seeing a shooting star overhead, finally makes Mary swoon by kissing the girl he loves.
Wings had a hell of a budget for 1927 ($2 million) but it paid off. Perhaps burgeoned with the public's current love of aviation thanks to Charles Lindbergh, the film ran for 63 weeks at theaters. I think it's more than that, though. For 1927, this film was extremely impressive. The fears my wife and I had going in were abated, as the film didn't plod on, it wasn't filled with silliness, the performances weren't exaggerated. On top of that, the dogfights were incredibly well-shot and the visual effects were quite ahead of their time. One such effect my wife caught before I did was that there was color of the flames coming out of the shot-down planes, despite this film being black-and-white. How did they do that? I admit, I had to look that one up. It was a trick called the Handschiegl color process, which had actually been in use for several years prior but was exclusively back then used for Paramount films such as this one. And here's a nugget of information that outright shocked us: Rogers actually had to LEARN TO FLY A PLANE for this role. Arlen had been a fighter pilot, so he already knew how to fly. But still...can you imagine today actors learning how to fly just to be in a movie? I can't.
This film was thought for many years to be lost, as all the original prints had been destroyed. Fortunately, Paramount had a spare negative in their vault. Still, the quality of that negative was quite deteriorated, so a lot of restoration was necessary. In fact, the entire musical score was re-recorded (but not changed from the original as composed) and the sound effects were recreated at Skywalker Sound using archival audio tracks. Watching and listening to the film that exists today, it's incredible how great Wings looks and sounds. One of the neatest touches done as part of the restoration is right at the start of the movie, where the current Paramount logo comes up on screen, and then subsequently older logos take their place until we get back to the original from 1927.
On May 16, 1929, the first Academy Awards ceremony was held to honor outstanding film achievements of 1927 and 1928. Wings wound up winning both awards it was up for, but it should be noted that for these first awards, things were VERY different. The awards weren't known as "Oscars" yet. There were only 12 categories, and several of them were abolished by the time the second Academy Awards took place. Most categories only had 2 or 3 nominees. Some names were nominated for their overall body of work within 1927-1928. One of the two categories Wings won for was Best Engineering Effects, which went to Roy Pomeroy who was specifically nominated for this film. The other two names nominated were not nominated for any one particular film, just by their names. (And as an aside, this category ceased to exist after this first ceremony.) Finally, and perhaps most interesting, there were actually TWO top awards. One was called "Unique and Artistic Production" and the winner was Sunrise. The other was called "Outstanding Picture", which went to Wings. Before the second Academy Awards ceremony, the "Unique and Artistic Production" category was abolished and "Outstanding Picture" was deemed the top honor, with Wings retroactively named as the rightful film to be deemed the top award winner. Plus, the award was renamed "Outstanding Production" to meld the two categories' names.
Confused yet? Hey, give 'em a break, they were just getting their feet wet here with this awards stuff. At least there weren't 37 other awards shows to compete with back then.
Until 2011's The Artist, this was the only silent film to win Best Picture. Despite winning only two Oscars, this film does not hold the record for least overall wins for a Best Picture winner (1932's Grand Hotel, one nomination for Best Picture, which it won, and no other nominations at all. At least one other film has also won Best Picture despite coming up empty with other nominations that it had). Wings is a very historic movie for a great number of reasons, but more importantly, it's a very GOOD movie. I was worried that the early days of Best Picture winners would be filled with films that don't hold up today. That may still hold true for some I've yet to blog about, but for the first Academy Awards in 1929, I'm proud to say that I think the Academy got it right. Wings is a winner that anyone who loves movies should see.
Very nice synopsis. I love your style of writing, both factual and comical. Can't stop reading, want it to continue. Reads like a fine novel. I want to see the movies that you review. Keep up the good work!
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