Wings (1927)

Wings (1927) is a silent movie about World War I fighter pilots directed by William Wellman and starring Buddy Rodgers, Richard Arlen, and Clara Bow (the “It” girl).  Wings tells the story of three small-town Americans swept into the storm of the Great War.  Jack (Buddy Rodgers), a mechanic, and rich kid David (Richard Arlen) are both vying for the love of Sylvia.  Jack doesn’t realize that the girl next door, Mary (Clara Bo), has a crush on him.  When America joins the war, both men join the Air Service.  The film follows them through their training and off to France and the battle zone.  Mary meantime has joined up as an ambulance driver and meets up with the boys on leave in Paris.  Finally, as the melodrama heightens, the “big push” will test the mettle of both pilots with an ironic twist of fate.  The plot and acting in Wings is very melodramatic and feels somewhat silly today.  But the melodrama is not the reason to see Wings.

The real attraction in Wings is the dramatic aerial footage of dogfights, chases, and crashes.  Remember, this is long before special effects.  These sequences were shot from airplanes weaving through the action.  The sensation of being in the air with the pilots still thrills today.  The crashes, while carefully choreographed, were real as well.  On the ground, Wellman recreated the Battle of Saint-Mihiel at Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas with over 3000 extras.  With bombs going off, planes flying overhead, and troops jumping in and out of trenches, it is amazing that only two people were injured, one fatally, in the making of Wings.

I have a personal connection to Wings.  My grandfather, Harry Perry, was the head cinematographer and was responsible for the incredible aerial cinematography for which Wings is known.  The logistics of planning the aerial sequences is hard to imagine.  In his unpublished autobiography, he lists some statistics: air cameramen flew 288 missions for over 500 flying hours (Harry flew 51 flights himself).  There were an additional 200 flights, with the motor-driven cameras to photograph actor/stunt pilot/reactions in spins, dives, and acrobatics for an additional 300 flying hours.  Wings cost 2 million dollars to make and was in production for one full year.  His brother Paul did the special effects in the movie including the champagne bubbles in the Paris sequence.

Wings premiered at the Criterion Theatre in New York on August 12, 1927 and it played for 63 weeks before moving on to second-run theaters. It was an enormous success with the critics and audiences alike.  In its initial presentation, Wings was shown in two parts, with an intermission.  Midway through Part One, the projected image switched to the Magnascope process which expanded the image several times over.  One critic wrote, “I don’t believe the camera has ever before produced an effect comparable to the wave of physical emotion that sweeps over the audience as the screen majestically enlarges to three or four times its normal size, and that first squadron of planes soars into view, scudding against a background of fleecy clouds.”  It must have been stunning to an audience that had seen the movies evolve from its infancy in a little over a decade.

Wings won two Oscars at the First Academy Awards:  Outstanding Picture, Production (considered the equivalent of today’s Best Picture) and Best Engineering Effects (the equivalent of Best Visual Effects).  It is the only silent movie to win Best Picture.  The first movie with sound, The Jazz Singer (1927), was released the same year as Wings and would change the movies forever.  At the Second Academy Awards, The Broadway Melody (1929), an “all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing” extravaganza would win Best Picture. 

After Wings, Howard Hughes hired Harry Perry to film his airplane epic, Hell’s Angels (1930).  This shoot is recreated in the film, The Aviator (2004) directed by Martin Scorsese.  Early in the movie, look for a guy in a leather flight jacket with a thin mustache asking for more cameras.  That’s my Grandpa!

Question of the Day: The boys meet a seasoned pilot played by a young actor who would become one of the all-time great movie stars.  Who is it?