10 / 10
Official trailer
Wings is the first film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It’s also the only silent film to win that award. William A. Wellman directed it. He had been a WWI fighter pilot himself, and that’s why the aerial sequences look the way they do. The film cost approximately two million dollars to produce. That made it one of the most expensive American films ever attempted at the time. It runs about two and a half hours. It’s among the great achievements of the silent era.
The plot is the kind of thing that became cliché only because Wings did it first. Two young men from the same small town, one rich and one poor, both in love with the same girl, both join the Army Air Service. They become friends. They fly missions over France. One of them dies. The girl who matters most loves only one of them and the audience knows it the entire time.
Wings knocks me flat. It’s nearly a hundred years old and the flying still looks more dangerous than anything a computer has given me since, because it was dangerous. Real men took those planes up. I’d put it at the top of the silent era, and I don’t have a single reservation about the 10.
The Aerial Sequences
Wellman had real WWI aircraft and a fleet of American military planes loaned by the War Department. He had three thousand five hundred infantry from Fort Sam Houston for the ground sequences and one hundred and sixty-five pilots for the air. I can’t think of a silent film sequence with more ambition than the Battle of Saint-Mihiel reenactment, and I’d match it against the battle scenes of any war film made since.
The dogfights are real footage. Real planes flown by real pilots, many of them WWI veterans, performing the maneuvers Wellman demanded with cameras mounted on the wings. Several pilots refused to fly the requested shots because they considered them too dangerous. Wellman flew them himself to prove it could be done. People got hurt during production. One pilot was killed.
For Writers
When the writer has direct experience of what they’re writing, the work has an authority that research can’t replicate. Wellman knew what an aircraft sounded like at six thousand feet because he’d flown one. He knew what a pilot saw, smelled, and worried about. The lesson is to write what you know, but understood properly. Not “only write about subjects you’ve lived.” Write the parts you know firsthand with maximum specificity. The parts you don’t know firsthand will benefit from the credibility you established in the parts you do.
The Romance
Clara Bow plays Mary Preston, the girl next door who loves Jack Powell (Charles “Buddy” Rogers).
Jack is in love with Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston), who loves David Armstrong (Richard Arlen). All three young men go to war. Bow’s name is above the title. She was the bigger star in 1927. The film knows this and gives her one of the great silent-era performances, including a scene in Paris where she’s mistaken for a prostitute and has to play the role to keep Jack from being arrested for being drunk.
The Paris sequence is the best comic sequence in the film, and it delights me. The bubbles in the champagne become animated bubbles floating across the screen, and the camera itself gets drunk along with Jack.
Clara Bow plays the scene with perfect timing, and I grin at it like a fool. Filmmakers in 1927 had no rulebook for a gag like this and invented one anyway.
For Writers
Tonal range in a war story is harder than depth in any single tone. Wings runs through romance, comedy, aerial combat, friendship, grief, and death without breaking. The trick is that each tonal shift is tied to the same characters. The audience accepts the Paris champagne sequence and the Saint-Mihiel reenactment in the same film because Jack is the protagonist of both. The lesson is that consistent character allows tonal variety. Inconsistent character makes any tonal shift feel like a different film.
The Death Scene
David is shot down behind German lines. The Germans capture him in a farmhouse. He escapes by stealing a German plane. He flies back toward the Allied lines. Jack, not knowing it’s David, shoots him down.
Jack lands and discovers what he’s done. The two scenes are filmed in close-up. There’s no intertitle on the kiss. The film doesn’t flinch. The death scene includes a kiss on the lips between the two men. In 1927.
The studio didn’t cut it. The Academy didn’t punish it. The audiences in 1927 watched it and went home. The historical record of how the film was received doesn’t suggest that the kiss was controversial. The men in 1927 understood that men in the trenches loved each other. The film says so plainly. Modern audiences sometimes have to be reminded.
That scene is the reason the 10 isn’t in any doubt for me. It’s tender and devastating, and the film trusts its audience to take it straight. I find it more moving than almost any death in the war films that came after it.
For Writers
Some forms of love and grief between men were easier to depict in 1927 than they’ve been in later eras. The death scene in Wings does what later war films have circled around without committing to. The lesson is that periods don’t get more enlightened in a straight line. What you can write in 2026 isn’t necessarily more honest than what could be written in 1927. Read the work of earlier eras with the assumption that they may have known things you have to relearn.
Craft Note
William A. Wellman directed. Clara Bow, Charles “Buddy” Rogers, and Richard Arlen led the cast. Gary Cooper had a small role that helped launch his career. Jobyna Ralston as Sylvia Lewis. Approximately two million dollar budget. Filmed at Kelly Field in San Antonio with War Department cooperation. Three thousand five hundred infantry and one hundred and sixty-five pilots involved. First Academy Award for Best Picture. Released August 1927. Paramount restored the print in 2012.
Does Wings still hold up?
10/10, with no hesitation from me. It’s the foundational American war film, and the aerial photography has aged better than almost anything in the silent era because the planes and the danger were real. The romance plot is sturdy, Clara Bow is a delight, and the death scene is braver than nearly anything war films have tried since. Watch the 2012 Paramount restoration, on the largest screen you can find.
