Wings: 1927

The first stop along my Oscars journey was Wings, a 1927 silent film about two World War I fighter pilots.

***I am going to preface this post by saying that I already think I'm out of my depth here and feel incredibly dumb. I knew NOTHING about the Academy in its infancy and I think that the research I've done to answer some of my own questions about the early Academy Awards proceedings warrants its own blog post. Thus, I have left most of the details of the very first Oscars ceremony out of this post, as it would most likely be triple the length of already is.***

I was very surprised by this movie. The only silent film I'd ever seen was The Artist, and as that film came out in 2011, I wasn't sure how accurately it reflected the films of the era. My memory of The Artist is also pretty foggy, so I really was going into this movie blind. I wanted to go into this experiment having done as little research as possible, but I accidentally found out one bit of information about Wings before I saw it: turns out that the filmmakers trained their actors to fly planes in order to shoot the aerial scenes! I am worried that I wouldn't have made that realization for myself because I'm so used to the incredible special effects and CGI of my generation. I probably would have assumed that they were filming in front of a screen. Not a green screen -- I'm not that ignorant -- but I unfortunately probably wouldn't have guessed that they weren't able to use any shortcuts at all. They went up HIGH, too. Like over the clouds high. No shortcuts indeed.

I started taking notes while I was watching, but I stopped eventually because I just wanted to watch and enjoy without missing anything, and I wanted to mostly make note of what made an impression on me without relying on my notes. But for the sake of being thorough, here's what I wrote down before I stopped writing things down:

WINGS (Paramount)

William A. Wellman - director

 "Young warriors of the sky"

Set in 1917

Jack Powell

Mary Preston

There are sound effects - punches, motors, propellers, gunfire, bubbles

Sylvia Lewis

David Armstrong

Schwimpf - slapstick character?

I hope they both live...

The flames are colored in!

There's actually gore!

They're really flying!

I was surprised to learn that sound effects were used. I genuinely thought a silent film truly meant silent, aside from the backing score. But I suppose post production existed just as much back then as it does now, even if the duties required are different. 

I was also surprised by the tools that were used in this movie for the time on which it was produced. I was surprised to see gore, and I was SHOCKED that there were BOOBS. This came out in 1927! Literally the LAST thing I was expecting to see when I started this movie was 1927 nudity. But I digress.

Initial reactions:

Often, when I watch noteworthy movies, I look for the REASON it's noteworthy, in terms of Aristotle's Six Elements of Drama-- Plot, Character, Thought, Diction, Music, and Spectacle. Don't ask me why - I know it's nerdy. Wings, in my opinion, won for spectacle, which is essentially any visual element of a piece. There wasn't much in the way of character development; one of the women the two men were fighting over (Sylvia deserved better!) dissolved into a mere plot point and never returned to the screen after the men left for war. The only development in these characters was during the last 30 minutes of the film, when David Armstrong comes to terms with his own mortality and Jack loses someone close to him. Jack's return home and subsequent change of heart, romantically speaking, seems very random and unjustified, seeing as he lined after Sylvia the entire movie until he read her letter to David right before the last battle scene. Mary's devotion to Jack endures the entire story, regardless of how many times he denied her, broke her heart, and took advantage of her in a drunken stupor, unable to recognize her. The most striking part of the film for me was the spectacle, the lengths to which the filmmakers went to get the right shot was incredible. The fact that the filmmakers actually put cameras on the noses of the airplanes in order to get footage of the actors in the air, just to be able to tell the story in their heads, strikes me as such an innovative and driven choice. Of course, I wasn't alive in the 1920s, and I wasn't one of the members of the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (yes, the International was part of the name for a short time), so I can't be sure why this film won Best Picture (production), but this is my speculation as to why it has staying power.

In full knowledge that I am a 21st century viewer, and that this was my first silent film that I've ever seen from the silent film era, I enjoyed this movie. Was it my favorite? No. But it was a war film that I could actually handle without being overwhelmed. I thought the ending was sweet, the visual effects were incredible, and I was entertained by the seemingly random twists and turns the story took to get the protagonist together with the girl that loves him. I found myself attached to the main characters and rooting for both of them to have a successful outcome, and I loved the motif of the shooting star - I am truly a sucker for sentimentality.

Next movie up is The Broadway Melody!