Icon of silent cinema still soars
1927 war film, first winner of the Academy Award for best picture, gets the Blu- ray treatment
With The Artist poised to become the first silent film to take home the best- picture Oscar in 83 years, it makes sense to take a look back at Wings, the first ( and only, to date) silent film to win the prize, in the first year of the Academy Awards.
That’s easy to do with the release Tuesday of a beautifully restored Blu- ray edition of the 1927 film.
The story is simple, schmaltzy entertainment. With the outbreak of the First World War, two small- town American boys, Jack Powell ( Buddy Rogers) and David Armstrong ( Richard Arlen), enlist as flyers. They leave behind Sylvia ( Jobyna Ralston), who loves David, although Jack is under the impression she favours him. Also at home is Mary Preston ( Clara Bow), the girl next door, who adores Jack and decides to follow him to Europe by joining the women’s motor corps.
The film had an almost inconceivable budget of $ 2 million, and it shows. The aerial combat sequences, with planes plummeting to earth in flames, are thrilling to watch today, and must have been more so at a time when few in the audience had ever flown. The filmmakers also borrowed an entire garrison of U. S. soldiers to re- enact the First World War on five acres near San Antonio, Tex.
Director William Wellman was a First World War pilot, and insisted the actors learn to fly their own biplanes. They even doubled as cameramen, operating film equipment that was bolted to their aircraft.
We tend to think of old silent films as unsophisticated, but Wings shows how far the medium had evolved by the dawn of talkies. Intertitles provide narration and dialogue, but also indicate accents (“not on me life”) and slang — “youse,” as in “youse guys.” There’s even a catchphrase, albeit it a simple one, as David repeatedly asks “All set?” to which Jack always answers: “Okay.” And there’s a stunning, how- did- they- do that shot, in which the camera moves through a series of tables at a crowded restaurant.
The bonus features include Restoring the Power and Beauty of Wings, which tells how the film was revived from a decaying nitrate print. Wings: Grandeur in the Sky provides a short history of the making of the movie, which wasn’t entirely silent ( some screenings featured sound effects), nor truly black and white; scenes were tinted amber or violet to match the mood, and flames were painted red.
Finally there’s Dogfight!, a history of aerial combat that recalls how pilots, originally sent aloft to observe troops below, started lobbing bricks at one another, then packing pistols and finally mounting machine guns on their planes. Before the timing belt that prevented them from shooting off their own propellers, one airman mounted steel plates on his prop to deflect his own bullets. This worked well until the constant pounding shattered the blades. The lesson, in aerial and cinematic history alike, seems to have been to keep on innovating.