By all accounts,
Wings
was a huge success when it opened in 1927.
The silent film set during WWI wowed audiences and critics alike, and
went on to garner the first Academy Award for Best Picture, the only silent
film to win until 2012’s
The Artist.*
*The Artist is a silent film, despite that one scene at the
end, and no matter what purists and nitpickers have to say about it.
With that kind of success, you would think more people would
be familiar with it, and that it would have some sort of lasting legacy. But something happened to Wings over the last eight decades. It’s gotten lost. These days, it rarely shows up on anyone’s
list of great movies, and doesn’t seem to rate much discussion even amongst hardcore
fans of silent films (now there’s a
group you don’t want to run into in a dark alley).
I used to pore over the lists of Oscar-winning movies,
looking at the titles and imagining what they were about. As a thirteen-year-old kid, I set a goal to learn
about and see every movie that won the Best Picture Oscar, a goal that would
officially be declared dead only in 1998, when The Great Atrocity occurred, and
the Academy awarded Best Picture to Shakespeare
in Love over both Saving Private Ryan
and Life is Beautiful. But Wings
was always an enigma. The books about
the movie industry and filmmaking that I got from the library offered little
enlightenment, other than mentioning its historic role as winner of the first
Oscar for Best Picture. Duh. In college I took some film analysis classes,
but Wings was not one of the movies
we dissected, or even obliquely discussed.
It was as though the film was no more than vapor, a see-through ghost, a
spirit that everyone seemed to know was there but that no one seemed particularly
inspired to acknowledge.

A pretty sad thing to be, if you’re a movie that was once
loved, I would think.
Fortunately, Paramount Pictures released a fully restored
version of the film in commemoration of its 100th year as a film
studio last year. And TCM, serendipitously
for me, included it in their annual “31 Days of Oscar” movie cavalcade in
February, finally affording me the opportunity to see this elusive film.
Thank you, TCM. My
life-debt to you is increased yet again.
I know I’m late on my payments. Please
don’t refer me to the life-debt collection agency, and please don’t send
someone to repossess me. My wife would
be so disappointed to come home one day and discover I’ve been repossessed.
Anyway, here’s the thumbnail sketch of the movie:
It starts with two young men who are rivals for the
affections of the same girl. Jack (Buddy
Rogers) is clever, daring and poor, while Dave (Richard Arlen) is reserved, smoldering
and rich. I’ll leave it to your
imagination to decide whom Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston) prefers. Meanwhile, Mary (Clara Bow) is totally
enamored with Jack. Beyond their petty
little problems, however, World War I is raging, and although these youthful
dreamers don’t know it yet, America
is just about to send four million lover-boys into no-man’s land.