Released 1927
Stars Clara Bow, Charles 'Buddy' Rogers, Richard Arlen, Jobyna Ralston
Directed by William A. Wellman

On the eve of the First World War, naive Jack Powell and rich David Armstrong vie for the attention of Sylvia Lewis, much to the chagrin of Mary Preston, who for years has carried a torch for Jack. Heeding Uncle Sam's call, Jack and David enlist and become friends as they go through flight training, battle the enemy in the air, receive medals for their valor, take a respite in Paris (where Jack is reunited with Mary, who has joined the Women's Motor Corps) and then return to battle Only one of the men survives.

Thus summarized, the story may seem too slight to be stretched to nearly two and a half hours. But those critics and viewers who complain about the film's running time miss the point. Wellman's sprawling and expensive ($800,000 in 1927) epic must of necessity take a measured pace in establishing youthful naivete, early and unformed impressions of military life, growing friendships during the rigors of training, and trials by fire before (in its final third) bombarding the viewer with a devastating blitzkrieg of images driving home the brutality of war.

So the viewer must wait some 40 minutes before Jack and David take their first flight; but as they begin to soar, so does Wings. [We can only begin to imagine the impact of the original showings, which used a large-screen process called Magnascope: as the dawn patrol took off, the frame expanded to several times its normal size.] The air battles, photographed by Harry Perry and his crew of assistants, are among the most astonishing flying sequences ever put on film (as visceral and thrilling as the battles which propelled George Lucas' Star Wars half a century later). Unlike Star Wars, there isn't even a whiff of back projection; strapped to the planes themselves, Perry's cameras hurtle the viewer through the clouds with almost sickening force. As Brownlow noted, "The audience is given the vicarious thrill of shooting down balloons, engaging the enemy in a dogfight, bombing a village, machine-gunning columns of troops and chasing and destroying a general's staff car."

But the worst of WWI is yet to come, for the concluding Battle of St. Mihiel packs even more of a wallop. Like much of the film, this sequence was filmed near San Antonio, Texas. The production was given full cooperation by the War Department, and Wellman had the army bombard the ground with field guns and then had teams of Mexican laborers dig trenches. The result, writes Frank Thompson, "was so eerily  effective that several of the fliers who had flown in France confessed to Wellman that just flying over the location made them nervous." The director spent ten days rehearsing the 3,500 troops and 60 planes that would be used in the scene - which, amazingly enough, was filmed in only one day.

"Wings" won the first Best Picture Academy Award for 1927-28.

Summary by  Dean Thompson