Wellman flew in the war and it shows: his dogfights are real aircraft in a real sky, filmed from inside them, and they still hold. The love story on the ground is thin and the film is long. Worth your evening for the air.
Wings is a silent film about two American boys who learn to fly, go to France and fight in the air, directed by a man who had done roughly that himself. William A. Wellman flew for the French in the First World War before he made films, and that explains the one thing about Wings nobody argues with. He did not fake the flying. The aircraft go up, the cameras go up with them, and the faces in the cockpits belong to the actors, with the wind flattening their cheeks. Nearly a century on, the air sequences still hold, and the ground story between them is what you sit through to get to the next one.
The ground story is this. Jack Powell (Charles Rogers) is building a racing car at home and is too busy to notice that Mary Preston (Clara Bow), the girl next door, is in love with him. He wants Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston), who wants David Armstrong (Richard Arlen), the rich boy in town. War comes, both boys enlist as fliers, and they end up in the same training camp and the same tent. Louis D. Lighton and Hope Loring wrote it from a story by John Monk Saunders, and it is the plot of a thousand magazine serials. The film knows this and does not mind.
What lifts the first act is a walk-on. Gary Cooper comes into the tent as Cadet White, takes a bite of a chocolate bar, shrugs off a question about luck and goes out to his aeroplane. He is on screen for perhaps two minutes and the whole camp goes quiet around him. We felt it go cold, we knew what was coming, and Wellman was right not to show it.
Then France, and the reason to watch. Harry Perry’s cameras are mounted on the aircraft, so when a plane rolls the horizon rolls with it, and when a pilot is hit he slumps in front of us rather than in a cutaway. E. Lloyd Sheldon cuts the dogfights so that we always know who is above whom, which is harder than it sounds when everything in the frame is grey sky and the same shape of biplane. One machine going down trailing smoke, the camera holding on it all the way to the ground, made us flinch, because it is quite plainly a real aeroplane falling out of a real sky. A late battle, with infantry and tanks under a ceiling of aircraft, is staged on a scale the film never draws attention to.
Wellman gets restless when he comes down to earth, and it produces the film’s best-known shot. In a Paris nightclub the camera glides forward across the tables, over couples and bottles and glasses, as though it had been drinking too. Edith Head and Travis Banton put Bow into a glittering borrowed dress for this interlude and the point is made without a title card: this is what Jack has failed to see. It is the only stretch of the ground story with the energy of the air.
Bow is the reason the rest of it is bearable. She moves. She sulks, drives, climbs, changes her mind, while the men stand still and emote in the direction of the lens. Rogers is eager and not much else. Arlen is quieter and the better of the two, and Henry B. Walthall and Julia Swayne Gordon, as David’s parents seeing him off with a small keepsake, moved us more than the whole triangle put together. El Brendel’s Herman Schwimpf is the comic recruit, and his comedy has not made the crossing into this century.
The film is 144 minutes and feels it. The second half returns to the triangle more often than the triangle can stand, and the title cards get longer as the plot gets more like a serial. The film also cannot decide whether flying is glorious or terrible, and says both, loudly, sometimes in the same reel. Wellman made harder and quicker films afterwards, The Public Enemy among them. He never made one that looked like this.
Watch it on the largest screen you have. The score depends on the print you find; the aeroplanes do not need any help.
