12/11/14
Wings (1927) Director: William A. Wellman
“D’you know what you can do when you see a shooting star?”
★★★★☆
The year is 1929, the place is the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel (in the “Blossom Room”). The first Academy Awards ceremony is underway and Inaugural emcee Douglas Fairbanks calmly distributes the first award for Best Picture. He hands it directly to the scandalous “It Girl,” Clara Bow, who accepts the award on behalf of the whole crew involved in making the silent war epic, Wings. These were the circumstances in which Wings won the inaugural award for Best Picture. The ceremony was humble, even quiet, the speeches were minimal, and the mood was optimistic. It lasted all of fifteen minutes. By all accounts this was a far simpler ceremony than the annual carnival-esque indulgent extravaganza we have come to expect these days. At the time, the cinematic world was seated upon the precipice of a gargantuan change –a technological and popular shift away from silent movies and toward the newly emerging talkies. Interestingly enough, Wings was the only silent film to win Best Picture prior to 2011’s The Artist (awarded in 2012), however Wings remains the only film from the true silent era to claim the top award. While often overlooked today, Wings was a mammoth undertaking at the time. Hundreds of extras were involved in filming this movie, all of whom were supervised by experienced World War I military officers, along with a cohort of 300 U.S. Air Corps pilots and actual warplanes that were used for the spectacular aerial scenes. The film’s production team clearly took its cues from the successful earlier war epic The Big Parade (1925).
Forever overshadowed by a later Best Picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Wings is nevertheless a towering, undeniable film. It is stands apart as the first Oscar-winner for Best Picture, though in my opinion this honor could have easily been bestowed upon F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (which actually won a unique one-time Oscar for Best Unique and Artistic Picture, a prize which has been since discontinued). Nevertheless, the grandeur of Wings exists in its lengthy high-flying aerial acrobatic scenes which were impressively captured via mounted camera and other tricks to shoot the myriad of extraordinary stunts that are featured in this film. In watching Wings for the first time I was utterly struck by these extraordinary technical achievements –tracking shots, long panning angles, and high-flying cinematography– all of which show planes soaring over vast valleys and fields, as well as vast sets filled with winding trenches, rolling tanks, and hundreds of extras. I can only imagine how death-defying stunts like these in Wings must have dazzled early 20th century audiences –bringing them closer to the more recent events of the “Great War” which was then only a decade old. Wings also launched a number of Hollywood stars, such as Gary Cooper, as well as Clara Bow, who was forever cemented as the “It Girl” (feel free to click here to read my review of Clara Bow in 1927’s It). She was apparently unhappy with her role in Wings, lamenting that it seemed little more than a “man’s picture and I’m just the whipped cream on top of the pie.” She was also engaged to Victor Fleming at the time of filming, but that didn’t stop her from having a torrid affair with co-star Gary Cooper. Amidst all the drama and stress of Hollywood, this proved to be Clara Bow’s last major film before she suffered a nervous breakdown and retired to a Nevada ranch to live a quiet life and raise a family. Wings also stars Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Richard Arlen, both of whom performed their owns stunts in the film (Mr. Arlen was actually a World War I veteran). Amazingly, only two stunt accidents occurred on set, one of which was sadly the fatal crash of a U.S. Army Air Corps pilot.
Dedicated to “those young warriors of the sky whose wings are folded about them forever,” Wings follows the intertwined rivalry of small-town friends Jack Powell (Buddy Rogers) and David Armstrong (Richard Arlen) as they enlist in the the Air Force during World War I. However, both Jack and David fall madly in love with a pretty girl named Sylvia Lewis, while another girl –a close friend and “girl next door” named Mary Preston (Clara Bow) is tragically in love with the oblivious Jack. Here, a love triangle ensues. Together, Jack and Mary come up with a name for Jack’s automobile he built called the “shooting star” after Mary draws a star on it. When the United States enters World War I, both men are sent away. Jack pays a visit to Sylvia who offers him a picture to carry with him, but secretly, her heart belongs to David.
In training, Jack and David share a tent with Cadet White (Gary Cooper) who tragically dies in an air crash. After completing their training, both Jack and David grow closer in friendship and they are shipped off together to France to fight the Germans. Meanwhile, Mary works as an ambulance driver and overhears that Jack has garnered a reputation as “The Shooting Star” for his skilled piloting. One evening she spots him on leave in Paris. She tries to approach him, but she discovers that he is drunk with his friend alongside a loose woman. In truth, the actor Rogers was drunk during the filming of this scene as he was only 22 and had never tasted alcohol before. At any rate, Mary convinces Jack to go home where she puts him to bed. Although nothing immoral occurs, while changing back into her ambulance uniform (Clara Bow’s breasts are briefly visible in this scene), a band of military police barge into the room and, believing she is a harlot, this mistaken moment forces Mary to resign her position under a shadow of disrepute.
The apex of the film occurs at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. David’s plane is shot down and he is believed to be dead, however, he manages to survive the crash and he escapes from the Germans while running through the forest. Soon, he recovers and steals a German plane in the hopes of crossing back over the allied line. But tragically, Jack spots the incoming German plane and, believing it to be a lone German plane on the attack, in a poetic twist of fate, Jack shoots down the German plane piloted by his old rival David.
On the ground, Jack tearfully realizes his error and embraces his dying comrade as they share the first on-screen same-sex kiss (much has been made of this moment, though it is clearly intended to be platonic and fraternal in the film). Jack is forced to return home wherein he is celebrated as a hero. He visits David’s family in order to beg for their forgiveness but they do not blame him for David’s death. Instead, they all lament the evils of war and Jack is reunited with Mary. In the end, he realizes his true love for her. It is a bittersweet conclusion.
The studio executives at the Famous Players-Lasky (soon to be Paramount Pictures) were unsure and even slightly skeptical of this bloated, untimely production, and antipathy toward director “Wild Bill” Wellman was high within the studio (so much so, in fact, that he was not invited to the film’s premiere, nor to the first Academy Awards ceremony where his film won Best Picture). The story was based on the writings of John Monk Saunders, an aviation instructor during the war who inspired the film. During production, Wings quickly ran over-budget, it was delayed, and the air corps threatened to withdraw their support if one more plane was destroyed in production. Nevertheless, Wings was finished and it quickly became a public sensation upon its release, especially considering the public’s infatuation with Charles Lindbergh and the nascent fascination with aviation at the time.
Upon the release of Wings in 1927, Variety wrote: “When the action [from a story by John Monk Saunders] settles on terra firma there is nothing present that other war supers haven’t had, some to a greater degree. But nothing has possessed the graphic descriptive powers of aerial flying and combat that have been poured into this effort.”
Credits:
- Director: William A. Wellman
- Screenplay by: Hope Loring and Louis D. Lighton
- Story by: John Monk Saunders
- Produced by: Lucien Hubbard, Adolph Zukor, Jesse L. Lasky, B.P. Schulberg, Otto Hermann Kahn (uncredited)
- Starring:
- Clara Bow…..Mary Preston, a spunky “girl next door” who is in love with Jack and who serves as an ambulance driver during World War I.
- Charles “Buddy” Rogers…..Jack Powell (Rogers, a non-pilot, needed to learn how to fly for this film but he suffered from severe motion sickness after each shot).
- Richard Arlen……David Armstrong (Arlen was a military aviator during World War I, and thus he did not require any training to film his scenes).
- Gary Cooper…..Cadet White (Gary Cooper’s a minor role in Wings helped launch his career in Hollywood. He began a tumultuous affair with Clara Bow during the production).
- Edited by: E. Lloyd Sheldon and Lucien Hubbard (uncredited)
- Music by: J.S. Zamecnik (uncredited)
- Production Company: Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation
Other Notes:
- While Wings won Outstanding Picture at the first Academy Awards ceremony, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise also won an equivalent award, “Best Unique and Artistic Picture,” which was discontinued in future years.
- Wings was one of the first films to realize the benefits of filming airplanes on cloudy days in order to give the audience a better perspective of depth and distance in the sky.
- Legendary Hollywood stuntman Dick Grace (1898-1965) performed numerous dangerous feats in Wings, one of which caused him to break his neck. He was a veteran of World War I (and also later World War II) and he was one of the few early Hollywood stuntmen who survived his time as a stuntmen and died of natural causes in 1965.
- In addition to winning the first Oscar for Best Picture, Wings also won an award for Best Engineering Effects (Roy Pomeroy).
- Wings was considered a “lost film” for many years until a complete print was discovered in France in 1992.
- Wings entered the public domain in 2023.
- The biggest earner this year was The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Singing Fool (1928).
The 1st Academy Awards Ceremony
Initially founded as an organization to side-step the rising labor movement (amidst fears that the filmmaking industry would become too unionized), MGM boss Louis B. Mayer spearheaded the creation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1926. At the time, Hollywood was a huge business, the fourth largest in the United States, releasing some 500 films per year, and showing them to a weekly audience of around 100 million people across 23,000 cinemas. MGM was the biggest and most successful of the studios –in its first year of operation from 1924-1925 it fronted a staggering $4 million for the epic film Ben-Hur starring Ramon Novarro, which earned back $10 million and made Louis B. Mayer one of the most highly paid executives in the country. Louis B. Mayer had previously owned a string of theaters in Massachusetts and New England area but after netting a sizable profit from screening The Birth of a Nation, he relocated to Los Angeles to found his own production studio. He was joined by other northeast studio owners, Adolph Zukor, as well as Jack, Harry, and Sam Warner. They founded the “Big Five” production studios –Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Mayer), Warner Bros. Pictures (co-founded by the Warners), Paramount Pictures (Zukor), 20th Century Fox (Darryl Zanuck), and they were soon joined by RKO co-founder David Sarnoff in 1928.
Now as the late 1920 began, Mayer wanted to build himself a Santa Monica beach house for his wife and teenage daughters, but he found that hiring outside labor for construction costs was going to be far cheaper and quicker. He started to grow concerned about the Studio Basic Agreement, a contract between nine film companies and five trade unions. It was signed after almost ten years of labor unrest in the industry, and it set minimum pay standards. But Mayer began to grow concerned about similar demands that might be made for writers, directors, and actors.
Actually, the idea was first proposed at either a lunch or an intimate dinner (I have seen conflicting accounts) held at Louis B. Mayer’s Spanish-style Santa Monica home. In attendance was Fred Niblo (director of the silent epic Ben-Hur), Conrad Nagel (one of the first silent film actors), and Fred Beetson (Will Hays’ second in command at the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, otherwise known as the “Hays Office”). From there, the Academy quickly sprung into formation at a dinner in the Crystal Room of the Biltmore Hotel (it was to be the last great gathering of artists from the silent era). Initial membership was open to the five branches of the industry: actors, directors, writers, technicians, and producers. Mayer’s hope was to unite these five branches in shared celebration of meritocracy and to prevent further unionization. “I found that the best way to handle filmmakers was to hang medals all over them. If I got them cups and awards, they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created.” Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. was elected as the first president of the Academy, while Fred Niblo became the first vice-president, and the Academy bestowed its first honorary membership upon Thomas Edison. The small art deco-styled bronze Oscar statuette was initially sketched by Art Director Cedric Gibbons (and further refined by his assistant Frederic Hope who added the five slots in the reel of film at the base of the statuette, one for each of the Academy’s branches) and then later sculpted by Los Angeles sculptor George Stanley (the origins of the statuette’s nickname “Oscar” is still under considerable dispute as several different sources claim to have nicknamed the statuette after one family member or another). After several preparatory gatherings, a small launch banquet for the Academy for three hundred people was held on May 11, 1927, at the Ambassador Hotel hosted by Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and by the end of the event, Academy membership had grown to 230 people (all of them paying the $100 joining fee).
The Academy was created just months before the release of The Jazz Singer and the sound revolution in film-making. As Bruce Davis writes in The Academy and the Award: “As much as the addition of synchronous sound was scoffed at, as much as it was feared by men at the top of the industry, and as expensive as it was for those men to give in to, the revolution came swiftly and completely: by the end of 1929, the silent-film era was essentially over. Except for Charlie Chaplin, who had the clout and the money and the stubbornness to continue swimming upstream for a while against an overwhelming current, nobody except those working far, far out in the boondocks would try to sell Americans a silent movie by 1930.” But at the time of the first Academy Awards ceremony, there was no serious fear of a sound revolution: it was, at most, a momentary fad happening over at Warner’s crash-strapped, tacky little studio.
Interestingly enough to me –as a geek for the Pulitzer Prizes– in its infancy, the Academy reached out to Columbia University for guidance in modeling itself upon the Pulitzer Prize’s annual award process (see Bruce Davis’s The Academy and the Award, page 61).
The first Academy Awards ceremony was held during a private dinner held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel (in the “Blossom Room”) in Los Angeles on May 16, 1929. There were 20 people in attendance who paid $5 each. It was a family intimate affair with 36 tables. On the menus were olives, nuts, half-broiled chicken, and chocolate ice cream. Janet Gaynor later reflected: “It was just a family affair. I remember there was an orchestra. And as you danced you saw most of the important people in Hollywood whirling past you on the dance floor. It was more like a private party than a big public ceremony. Had I known then what it come to mean in the next few years, I’m sure I would have been overwhelmed.” It honored the best films from August 1, 1927 to July 31, 1928. The winners had been announced three months ahead of the ceremony and the award-giving lasted all of fifteen minutes. And the big winners at the ceremony included Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven and F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise (both starring Janet Gaynor) with three awards apiece (the latter winning for Unique and Artistic Picture which was discontinued the following year), and Wings receiving two awards, including Outstanding Picture (later known as Best Picture). After the 1st Academy Awards (1927–1928), a variety of changes were made, including the number of award categories were reduced from twelve to seven.
- Best Picture: William A. Wellman – Wings
- Lewis Milestone – The Racket
- Frank Borzage – 7th Heaven
- Best Unique and Artistic Picture (discontinued post-1929): F.W. Murnau – Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
- Merian C. Cooper – Chang
- King Vidor – The Crowd.
- Note: King Vidor led a distinguished career in Hollywood, having directed the silent war epic The Big Parade (1925) and also the Kansas scenes in The Wizard of Oz (1939), albeit uncredited. Vidor was nominated five times by the Academy Awards for Best Director. In 1979, he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for his “incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator.” The Academy wanted The Crowd to win in this category, but Louis B. Mayer felt it sent the wrong message for a film that made little money from his own studio sent the wrong message so Sunrise was selected instead.
- Best Directing (Comedy Picture, merged post-1929): Lewis Milestone – Two Arabian Knights.
- Note: Lewis Milestone would win Best Director for All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Throughout his career, he was nominated a total of four times for Best Director, winning twice.
- Charlie Chaplin – The Circus
- Note: The Circus originally received three nominations: Best Director (Comedy Picture), Best Actor, and Best Writing (Original Story) – for Charlie Chaplin. However, the Academy subsequently decided to remove Chaplin’s name from the competitive award categories and instead to confer upon him a Special Award “for acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus.”)
- Ted Wilde – Speedy
- Best Directing (Dramatic Picture, merged post-1929): Frank Borzage – 7th Heaven
- Herbert Brenon – Sorrell and Son
- King Vidor – The Crowd
- Best Actor: Emil Jannings as General Dolgorucki (Grand Duke Sergius Alexander) in The Last Command and as August Schilling in The Way of All Flesh.
- Note: These would be Janning’s last awards in Hollywood as he soon returned to Germany where he appeared in a variety of Nazi propaganda films and earned the praise of Joseph Goebbels. His former co-star Marlene Dietrich, an avowed anti-Nazi activist, loathed him for the rest of her life.
- Richard Barthelmess – The Noose as Nickie Elkins and The Patent Leather Kid as The Patent Leather Kid
- Charles Chaplin – The Circus as The Tramp
- Best Actress: Janet Gaynor – as Diane in 7th Heaven, as Angela in Street Angel, and as The Wife in Sunrise.
- Note: all three of her performances were of very different characters (for the first Academy Awards actors and actresses were nominated based on numerous performances, but this rule would be dropped in future years). Janet Gaynor would be nominated for Best Actress again for the first version of A Star Is Born (1937).
- Louise Dresser – A Ship Comes In as Mrs. Pleznik. This was the only Oscar nomination during an impressive 15-year career in which she appeared in 50 films. She was a former Broadway star.
- Gloria Swanson – Sadie Thompson as Sadie Thompson. During her long career, Gloria Swanson would be nominated for Best Actress three times, most famously for her unforgettable performance in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.
Honorary Awards:
- Charles Chaplin – “To Charles Chaplin, for acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus.” Chaplin would not receive another Academy Award until 1972 when he returned to the United States after nearly two decades to receive another honorary award, this time for his overall achievements in cinema. The following year, Chaplin’s score for Limelight received the Academy Award for Best Music (by then, Limelight was 20 years old but it hadn’t been released in the Los Angels area).
- Warner Bros. – “To Warner Bros., for producing The Jazz Singer, the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry.”
Did the right film win Best Picture?
Wings is a perfectly satisfactory choice for the inaugural Best Picture winner in my view –I am glad that at least one true winner from the silent era was honored with the highest award. Unfortunately, today F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise never seems to get the recognition it deserves, and Murnau remains one of the great silent masters. Other high caliber films I would have considered for Best Picture in 1926-1927 would have been: Fritz Lang’s epic dystopian silent science-fiction masterpiece Metropolis (1927); Alfred Hitchcock’s first great murder mystery The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927); Charlie Chaplin’s bittersweet classic The Circus (1928); King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928); and Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927).
Click here to return to my survey of the Best Picture Winners.
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