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| Clara Bow in Wings (1927) |
Wings (1927) tells the story of two young men and one young woman. [SPOILER ALERT!] The two fellas start out adversaries because of the woman, they join the Army when the U.S. enters what would become known as World War One, they become friends, and then they become fighter pilot friends. Meanwhile, the woman joins the women's auxiliary service and becomes an ambulance driver in France where the two men are stationed. [END SPOILER ALERT!] It's a silent film from the year "talkies" made their debuts. And it was the first film to be awarded an Oscar for "Outstanding Picture," the forerunner of the "Best Picture" award.
Its director, William Wellman, was a standout director at a time in Hollywood when producers controlled all the creative aspects of a movie and the director was just an employee the producer hired to do a job. Wellman would go on to direct The Public Enemy (1931), Call of the Wild (1935), A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Dead End (1937), Beau Geste (1939), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), Battleground (1949), and The High and the Mighty (1954), among many other films.
Between 1926 and 1930 the biggest and most bankable star at Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation (later, Paramount Pictures) was Clara Bow, the world's top box office draw for three of the five years. [SPOILER ALERT!] After she landed the starring role in Wings, she easily got her then-boyfriend a small but impactful role in the movie as a doomed fighter pilot. Cadet White makes a brief appearance but an unforgettable impression on his fellow pilots and on moviegoers, with the actor almost exploding onto the screen. Audiences loved the 26-year-old, and his career began to take off. His name: Gary Cooper. [END SPOILER ALERT!]
Wings tapped into America's hero-worship of the men who turned the tide in the war in 1917 and the women who risked their lives in supporting positions. It is a touching movie, visually stunning at times, and features realistic aerial dogfights and special effects.
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In 1933, the M.G.M film Bombshell hit the theaters. Jean Harlow, herself a wildly popular actor, plays Lola Burns, the world's number-one box office draw, living in a palatial Beverly Hills estate with servants waiting on her hand and foot, living an ideal life—well, it might have been ideal except that too many family members were hanging around asking for handouts; her agent was a weasel; and her studio publicity department constantly fed the tabloid press lurid untrue stories. It was enough to make a star wish that she weren't a star at all. Welcome to the world of Clara Bow.
She was born into poverty in Brooklyn, New York, in 1905. Her mother was in and out of institutions during much of her childhood. Her father was a violent man. He raped her when she was 16, and might have continued his incestuous hold over her well into her stardom years.
When she arrived in Hollywood in 1922, full of talent and energy, she began making friends with the right kind of people—studio boss and producer B.P. Schulberg, director Frank Tuttle, newspaper reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons. They all came to her defense later on when the tabloids began to rip her life apart.
Between her film debut in Beyond the Rainbow (1922), in which she had 14th billing, and her triumph in Wings (1927) with top-billing as a volunteer ambulance driver for the allies in France, she earned notice and praise in film after film, thirty-eight in that stretch of time, playing flapper girls and ingenues and what were then called "tomboys," knocking competitor veteran female actors aside with her talent and growing popularity, building a huge loyal audience and, along with it, Hollywood leverage.
In early 1927, Paramount Famous Lasky released It, with Clara Bow in the role of a young woman on the make blatantly using her sexuality and sex ("it") to get what she wants. She was so spellbinding in the role that the nickname which word-of-mouth created would follow her till death and beyond: "the It girl."
She lived a private life publicly thanks to the tabloid press who followed her wherever she went. And what the tabloids couldn't uncover or effectively embellish, they invented. But she gave them plenty of stories just being herself without any discernible self-restraint. Though she didn't advertise her promiscuity, she made no effort to hide it. She used colorful street language when talking to anyone but children.
By 1933—between the family parasites she attracted, always with their hands out, and the unrelenting tabloid voyeurism—she couldn't stand it anymore. She retired from movies at age 28 and settled down as a rancher in Nevada. She died in 1965.
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Director William Wellman was occasionally a writer. And he wrote a story that he turned into the screenplay for A Star Is Born (1937), a movie that has been made four times.
In the 1930s, Barbara Stanwyck and her husband Frank Fay were busy and popular entertainers. When they met, fell in love, and got married, he was the bigger star. But soon she began to eclipse him in both talent and popularity. His "drinking problem" got worse with each passing year. Friends were concerned that his alcoholism would manage to destroy Stanwyck's career, which seemed to have no limits. But she stood by her husband, year after year, until she couldn't do it anymore.
William Wellman was a friend of both. He had directed her in Night Nurse (1931), a picture in which she gave a noteworthy performance. And in the midst of watching what was happening to the couple he wrote a story about a marriage between two stars being destroyed by alcoholism, with one star on the rise and the other on the decline. The studio never said A Star Is Born was based on a true story. But Hollywood was still a company town and very much a small town in a big city. Everyone in Hollywood could see it was a true story. And everyone in Hollywood could see who the couple were.
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The art direction in Wings is outstanding. But the viewer must look past the sometimes clumsy, sometimes pedestrian camerawork to see it. It helps to freeze-frame Wings periodically or, better yet, take selective screenshots of the movie. The cameraman was occasionally brilliant and light was occasionally shed on this masterful production.
The uncredited art director for Wings was Hans Dreier. His stellar and long résumé of films, receiving no credit in almost every one of his early ones, includes The Smiling Lieutenant (1931); Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931); Shanghai Express (1932); A Farewell to Arms (1932); Trouble in Paradise (1932); Island of Lost Souls (1932); I'm No Angel (1933); Duck Soup (1933); Design for Living (1933); Anything Goes (1936); The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936) (the first feature-length film shot and shown in color); The Plainsman (1936); Midnight (1939); Union Pacific (1939); Beau Geste (1939); Northwest Mounted Police (1940); The Lady Eve (1941); Sullivan's Travels (1941); This Gun for Hire (1942); Holiday Inn (1942); The Palm Beach Story (1942); I Married a Witch (1942); The Road to Morocco (1942); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1942); and Double Indemnity (1944), among his 549 films over a span of 35 years.
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The original pair of negatives for Wings were lost. For decades after its release, Wings was considered a "lost" film. But in 1992 a spare print was found in the archive of Cinémathèque Française in Paris. It was quickly copied and shown in American theaters.
Then a few years later a spare negative was discovered in a Paramount Studios vault. It was meticulously restored and released on DVD and Blu-ray in 2012.
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Wings was added to the National Film Registry in 1997.
