Best Picture Winner #1
Release Date: May 19, 1927
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 24 minutes
Director: William Wellman
Quick Impressions:
My daughter and I dream up a fun project to do together every summer. This year, we’ve decided to watch every film that won the Oscar for Best Picture (that we can get our hands on) in order (if possible). I’ve been meaning to do this, anyway, since I’ve already seen most of them from the 80s on. (I loved watching the Academy Awards even as a child.) When my daughter (a silent movie buff) heard the first Best Picture winner was a silent movie, she insisted we watch it immediately!
Luckily, I had a copy of Wings on our DVR saved for just such an occasion. It aired on TCM a few weeks ago on one of their silent movie nights.
For a long time now, I’ve considered my failure to watch Wings an almost shameful gap in my cinematic education. I mean, it’s the first Oscar winner! I’m a movie buff, and I’ve made a point to watch every Best Picture nominee before the ceremony ever since I realized in a panic while watching the Oscars my senior year of high school, “I don’t know any of these movies! I don’t recognize anyone here but Lauren Bacall, Tom Cruise, and Billy Crystal! I’ve got to start prepping for this!” As an adult, I’ve attempted to watch as many Oscar nominated films and performances as I can before the nominations are announced. (This involves a lot of guesswork and exploration, which is part of the fun.) I’ve seen every Best Picture winner from 2000 on with the glaring exception of Spotlight. We didn’t go to the theater at all when my son was an infant. My mother, a Michael Keaton fan, showed interest in watching it at home together later, until she learned what the movie was about. She usually finds the films I seek out unpalatable and depressing. (That was how I found Artemis Fowl this weekend. I’m so glad I thought of writing about Wings instead!)
Wings has always sounded unpalatable to me. I went in knowing the epic about World War I pilots cost a fortune and took forever to film. I tend to get lost in action scenes, so I always assumed I would find the movie boring. How wrong I was!
What a discovery! I don’t think I’ve been this pleasantly surprised by a film since my husband and I showed up at the wrong theater, bought last minute tickets to anything playing, and were treated to Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit!
Besides innovative aerial photography, Wings has fascinating characters, a delightful performance by Clara Bow, and enviously gorgeous shot composition. (The amateur photographer in me thought, “I need cinematographer Harry Perry to give me tips on how to take portraits of my children.”) The story is gripping and full of strange surprises. The title cards are often almost poetic. And do you know what else? I cried at the end. Sometimes it’s hard to be moved by a silent film because I watch and painfully feel the distance between the movie’s world and my own. But Wings made me cry. It’s very good.
Now, we were lucky to see a version that has obviously been lovingly restored, so it was easy on the eyes and ears. I don’t know if the score we heard was originally written for the film. Our version also included sound effects like gunfire. I have no idea if that played with the original film, either. I’ll have to research it now.
My daughter absolutely loved Wings. She took pages of notes. (Her goal with our project is to study the components of these Best Picture winners and try to create the type of film that would win Best Picture herself. That’s pretty ambitious, but she’s eleven.) “My favorites last year were 1917, Parasite, and Jojo Rabbit,” she said, “and I liked it better than all of those. I may like it more than any movie ever.”
“More than Clue?” I pressed (because she really loves Clue).
“That’s not fair,” she said. “This is a different kind of movie.”
“True,” I agreed. “Clue is like the comfort food of movies.”
It’s easy to see why Wings would win an Oscar. After watching it, and listening to my daughter gush about it, I am positive she will find this project anticlimactic. Wings is hard to top.
The Good:
It’s hard to say what I liked better in Wings, the character driven story or the incredible cinematography. If pressed, I would say that the cinematography is by far the film’s most impressive element, but the delightful characters make the film both fun to watch and unexpectedly moving at the end.
Wings is about two young American men (initially in love with the same woman) who leave home to fight as pilots in World War I, quickly become best friends, and gradually become war heroes. The film’s final act walks a dizzying tightrope between Greek tragedy and Hollywood rom-com. It’s impossible to take your eyes off the screen.
Imagine how difficult shooting realistic scenes of aerial battles must have been in 1927! Staging and shooting the war scenes alone is a remarkable feat! But I love Harry Perry’s cinematography far more for its ordinary moments. The visual energy of the character introductions is outstanding. Clara Bow makes such an unforgettable entrance! When I think of silent movie stars making an entrance, I imagine Greta Garbo slinking around mysteriously or Theda Bera looking sly. But Clara Bow’s literal girl-next-door Mary pops up from underneath a clothesline and ends up “wearing a pair of underwear on her head” as I said to my son. It’s actually more like a slip, bloomers. All my life, I’ve heard Clara Bow associated with bloomers, but I didn’t know she wore them on her head! Then Mary jumps the fence and starts helping Jack, the boy-next-door, rip apart his car to turn it into a homemade racer. Both Bow and Charles “Buddy” Rogers (who plays the film’s usually oblivious and often enraging hero Jack) have intensely expressive faces. But part of what makes this introduction to these characters so exciting to watch is the careful composition of each shot, the way everything is presented to us, the framing. This is definitely not just turn-the-camera-on-and-go kind of stuff.
Moments later, we meet David (Richard Arlen), the film’s other male lead and Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston), the woman Jack and David both love. They’re sitting together on a porch swing. I almost died at the beauty of their introduction. The composition of the shot just killed me with its beauty and its symbolism. David is in the arms of the woman he loves, tied down to earth by the chains of the porch swing, and then behind them, between the chains of the swing, Jack drives up in the Shooting Star (his then racer and future fighter pilot nickname). I lack the technical vocabulary to describe how this looks, but you should watch for yourself. The shot is amazing. These early scenes contain amazingly thoughtful shot composition, and the cinematography continues to be captivating and inventive as the story progresses. On a side note, Richad Arlen gives my favorite performance of the movie (aside from scene-stealer Clara Bow) as the tormented and far-more-sympathetic-than-Jack David. Julia Swayne Gordon is very good as David’s mother, too. (And watch out for a young Gary Cooper!)
For my daughter, the characters pulled focus. She could not get over the latent (or perhaps blatant) homoeroticism of the developing Jack/David relationship. She talked about it throughout the whole film and took copious notes. Others might argue that what she’s really seeing is a homosocial bond, a friendship forged by the horrors of war, but still others would ask, “What’s the difference?” She could make an entire academic career out of pursuing this line of thought. The dynamic she’s picking up on is definitely there, a huge theme of the story. What exactly is going on between Jack and David could be the subject of an entire conference or course or book. What I’m saying is, the relationship dynamics in this film are fascinating. And the performances are more relatable and underplayed than some silent acting I’ve seen.
Best Scene Visually:
My favorite of the film’s innumerable striking visuals is the moment when a certain character dies, and we immediately cut to a plane in front of a graveyard. Slowly the propeller comes to a complete stop.
Extremely memorable, too, are several shots of the shadows of moving planes.
But it is pretty hard to top Clara Bow popping up with the bloomers on top of her head.
And speaking of popping up, Wings also gifts us with this weird, drunken interlude in Paris. A ridiculously intoxicated Jack suddenly begins hallucinating bubbles everywhere. I’m quite curious about how they made the bubbles. Are they drawn on the film? Are they stopping the camera and using actual bubbles? I never would have expected such bubbly, bizarre stuff to be in this movie. Clara Bow has some wonderful moments here, too.
Best Action Sequence:
If you love planes or World War I battles, you must watch Wings for its spectacular scenes of aerial warfare. I don’t know how they managed to get some of this incredible photography in 1927 without actually destroying a bunch of planes. (And I assume that they did.) They must have used existing crash footage, or actually had stuntmen crash planes, or perhaps had skilled fliers simulate crashing. Whatever technique they used, it’s astonishing to me that they were able to capture it all on film. (I mean, what if you had the perfect shot set up, and then a cloud went by between the plane with the camera and the other planes?) I’m assuming the cockpit shots are actually filmed on the ground. I said to my daughter that surely only James Cameron would put an expensive camera where it might quickly be destroyed. (Have you seen Ghosts of the Abyss? Part of what makes it so good is listening to Bill Paxton fretting about Cameron’s willingness to risk and destroy expensive equipment.) In 1927, they didn’t have go-pros.
Near the end of the movie, we get a look at “the last big push.” This part is almost non-stop action. The best part, of course, is David’s desperate scheme to escape, and Jack’s determination to show his deep feeling for him through heroics. This is the kind of human drama that had us both screaming at the television screen. (And I mean, you can because it’s a silent movie. You won’t miss anything.)
Best Fleeting Moment:
There’s another death in this film that comes so suddenly. A guy is sitting there one second, and then suddenly he’s dead (of a wound that no one notices happening). At first, a fellow soldier tries to wake him. Then he just stomps out his cigarette.
Best Scene:
That engaging scene with David’s escape attempt is best, but my daughter prefers Jack and David’s final big scene together. She kept yelling at the screen, “Kiss him! You are so close!” And then they actually do kiss, and she almost fell off the couch.
The Negatives:
The only thing we didn’t like about this film (other than Jack’s enraging obliviousness which was kind of fun to call out) was the way it depicts night. The color of the film is this lovely golden amber, but at night, it becomes a blue black. I understand their inability to film at night and the need to show the night to the audience. But the sepia tone is so lovely, and that other color is just not as easy on the eyes. It always felt like an interruption to us.
Today’s audiences also might find jarring the racial tension between the American recruit with a German sounding name and the apparently Irish sergeant. Well, I mean, it’s not like today’s audiences aren’t used to blatant, violent racism and ethnic prejudice. But here it’s sort of played for comedy.
Overall:
Wings is an astonishingly good film. It’s well made, well acted, spectacularly shot, captivating, entertaining, at moments funny, genuinely moving. And frankly, I’m glad we thought of watching it because my attempts to review the less-than-stellar Artemis Fowl were making me more depressed by the second. Whether or not you usually like war movies or silent films, I’d recommend giving this one a try.