In the mid-20s, Hollywood’s movie moguls were always on the lookout for grand projects to head their annual schedules, and in 1926 Paramount (then the major studio) bought Wings, a Great War flying story by John Monk Saunders. A wartime training instructor who, to his enduring chagrin, never got to France, Saunders devoted his Hollywood career to flying movies, creating what became a dominant adventure genre of the 30s. A little-known B-movie director, William A Wellman, was hired as director because of his active service as a pilot in the war, and the film was shot in Texas with the US army providing 220 planes and hundreds of skilled extras.
A mixture of melodrama, sentimental romance and heavy-handed comedy, Wings was superbly choreographed with skilfully photographed stunt flying and aerial combat. It tells the tale of two small-town boys (Richard Arlen, Charles Rogers) undergoing flight training in the US and becoming heroic flying aces in France. The movie’s cast is led by Clara Bow, the It girl and Paramount’s biggest star. She plays a lively tomboy, first seen provocatively pushing aside a pair of knickers on a washing line to emerge in close-up and later appearing briefly naked in Paris after following the boys to France as an ambulance driver. But the centre of the tale is the homoerotic relationship between Arlen and Rogers, and although everything in the film is of historical and cultural interest, the flying and the flyers are what makes it endure.
This beautifully restored print, with hand-tinted shots of cannon fire and explosions, as well as the original score, is first rate. The movie was an immense success when it premiered in August 1927 with an opening commendation from Colonel Charles Lindbergh, who’d become a worldwide hero earlier that year. It ran on Broadway for more than 60 weeks, made Wellman a major director and had audiences everywhere talking about the tall, lean, diffident Gary Cooper, who has an indelible five-minute cameo as a charismatic pilot the young heroes idealise. The dual DVD/Blu-ray disc features an informative “making of” documentary.
