 List Price: $14.95 
Amazon.com: Wings, 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 Wings, 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. --Ali Davis Customer Reviews: Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-04
This is where it all began.
This 1927 film is the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, thus beginning a new era of motion pictures. It was also the only silent film to have won this prestigious award.
I have wanted this DVD for a long time. It is hard to get and currently not available on DVD in this country. I've read other reviews that said how their copy was poor quality. However, the DVD that was given to me by a very dear friend is from Hong Kong and the quality is above average to excellent. You just have to endure the Chinese subtitles as you can't remove them with a flick of a button.
This film is long, 138 minutes and since it's silent, you can't miss anything. I tend to fall asleep during long films, but this one was so enchanting and I was waiting to see it forever, that I lasted the entire 138 minutes.
The star, Jack Powell (Charles Rogers) is a young guy that thinks of nothing but flying airplanes and cars. His next door neighbor, Mary (Clara Bow), really loves him, but Jack only sees at her as a friend. Jack wants Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston), but she is in love with a very wealthy guy, David Armstrong (Richard Arlen).
Jack and David are friends and join the armed services to fight in World War I in France. Their relationship is somewhat strained as they are both in love with Sylvia. Mary joins the Women's Corp, trying to be close to Jack. He hits on another girl in France while partying down, Mary sees this and decides to go back stateside and try and forget him. Jack and David become tight pals, but since this is a war, tragedies happen. After Jack returns, he realizes that Mary is the girl for him.
The acting was suburb! Clara Bow was cute and convincing. There is even a short scene with a very young Gary Cooper as Cadet White. His character was memorable even if he was only in this film for a couple of minutes. We also see the beginning of special effects with planes and dogfights and "bubbles". It is truly worth watch this to see the start of the hobby we love so much finally getting an award for achievement.
Please enjoy this film...and thank you Clint for finding it for me. Rating:
Date: 2008-06-03
Off to a Good Start
Much note has already been made of the fact that "Wings" won the very first "Best Picture" Oscar. It's worth repeating since that, and the presence of Gary Cooper in a minor role were the reasons I chose to watch it. For the record, I thought I might have trouble picking out Cooper but he was the main focus on the screen in the brief time he appeared. Clara Bow was the main star in name and billing although hers was essentially a supporting role. Some may disagree with that but I felt the real strength of "Wings" was the aerial combat and its' brilliant camera work. The essential story is two rivals for the hand of the other girl they left behind and how their competion turned them into flyering Aces. The script was above the standard of its' day (although this is no "Grand Illusion").
Near the end the story takes an unusual twist which led to a most bizarre extended scene. For the record, this is a silent movie and my wife came into the room wanting to hear (on the radio) the high school baseball team play in the state championship game (they won 1-0) so I turned the sound completely off while I watched the ending. I probably missed some very sad music that could have changed my perspective of the scene in question and I certainly understood the cameraderie that had developed between the two men and the poignant circumstances. However, I couldn't help but think that I was watching the most expressive love scene between two men in the first 50-60 years of Cinema. You watch that scene with no sound and you'll see what I mean if you don't already. To quote Seinfeld, "Not that there's anything wrong with it" but I was really surprized by what I was watching. After that, everything was predictable but it was still enjoyable to watch. I was really impressed with the sets, the planes, and the action (and the outcome of the baseball game). Rating: 
Date: 2008-04-04
Talented Charles "Buddy" Rogers
Yes, I am a fan of Charles "Buddy" Rogers, the clean cut hero in the film who I first watched in "My Best Girl" (1927). He's charming and makes this movie shine.
Plus, the young Gary Cooper (is this his first movie ever?) and Clara Bow are in this too.
It's a wonderful silent movie, well done. No wonder it won the first Academy Award. Rating:
Date: 2008-02-15
Holds up exceptionally well.
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. ****
Rating:
Date: 2008-01-27
And The First Best Picture Oscar Goes To...
...WINGS. That was way back in 1927. It remains one of the great anti-war films even though the war is World War I. It also marks the apex of the careers of its three stars: Clara Bow, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, and Richard Arlen. Buddy Rogers would later marry Mary Pickford and concentrate on Big Band music while Clara Bow made only a few sound films which have long been unavailable. Richard Arlen is best remembered today as the hero of 1932's THE ISLAND OF LOST SOULS with Charles Laughton. The director William Wellman would go on to quite a distinguished career making such films as THE PUBLIC ENEMY with James Cagney, the 1937 A STAR IS BORN and 1943's THE OX-BOW INCIDENT. Wellman had actually flown planes during the Great War and so he wanted to make sure that this film captured what it was like to fly and to engage in combat up in the skies. One of the film's great strengths is the outstanding aerial photography which Howard Hughes would copy for HELL'S ANGELS three years later. Another strength, surprisingly, is the story itself. While basically one of the first buddy films, WINGS manages not only to capture the horrors of war (as THE BIG PARADE with John Gilbert had two years earlier) but the innocence of pre-WWI America as personified by the three main characters. Clara Bow in particular gives a truly outstanding performance showing that she was more than just a 1920's sex symbol when given a good script and placed in the hands of a capable director like Wellman. By the time the film is over you long for its beginning and the stability and security of small town America. The final scenes in particular are among the most powerful in all of silent film with an ending that you have waited the whole movie for. Officially Paramount (who made and owns the rights to WINGS) has yet to issue the film on DVD. What is currently available are used copies of the 1989 VHS version which was once available on laserdisc. The picture quality is above average for a silent film on videotape but falls short of a restoration. It does come with a rousing Gaylord Carter organ score as did the other 8 Paramount silent titles first released at about the same time. I keep hoping that someday Paramount will release an official DVD edition as they did with the 1923 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS that will contain extra features and inserts. The film is an American classic and deserves to be treated as such. Until that time this remains the only version you can currently lay your hands on.
|
