How exciting to be young and American in the 1920s. You’ve survived the trenches, there are glamorous gangsters and luscious jazz babies galore, every block has an illicit speakeasy, Fitzgerald and Hemingway are at the peak of their powers - and best of all, any sound film would’ve impressed you more than a million Jurassic Parks. What a world of amazing technological innovations you lived in!
Although it was released the same year as Al Jolson vehicle The Jazz Singer, William Wellman’s Wings wasn’t a ‘talkie’. Even if it had featured actors speaking real words, it’s doubtful people would have made much mention of it, for what Wings had going for it was spectacle. Before it came out, audiences would find anything shiny or animated almost pant-wettingly exciting - even things as mundane as a train pulling into a station in Southern France seemed fascinating. In restaging the great air battles of World War I, Wellman created the first true action movie. This was a time, remember, when fliers were few and where Blackpool Tower was considered exciting and innovative because it allowed people to view the world from a perspective few had ever enjoyed.
Wings really is the archetypal modern action movie - it takes its inspiration from real events (the exploits of flying aces Roy Brown and the Red Barron) and in time it inspired that most modern of concepts, a sequel, Young Eagles, which followed in 1980. Unusually for an action picture, Wings was praised across the board proving simultaneously popular with the crowds, the critics and the film industry who awarded Wings the inaugural Best Picture Oscar. But in having a storyline that makes Spot Goes To The Farm look like one of James Ellroy’s more impenetrable efforts, Wings also paved the way for years of thrill-inducing, intellect-disrespecting cinema.
Wings stars Clara Bow as Mary. Mary is in love with would-be air ace Jack (Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers) who is too taken with Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston) to notice. Sylvia, however, is in love with David (Richard Arlen). When the US eventually decides to enter the Great War, Jack and David sign up to serve in the air force, where they become good friends. Matters are further complicated by Mary who has joined the Motor Corps. Sexual jealousy, bizarre love triangles, dangerous but oh so sexy machinery - Wings was the Top Gun of its day. With the added bonus of no Kenny Loggins on the soundtrack.
Risible nonsense on the page, Wings came to life courtesy of action sequences informed by the personal experience of ‘Wild’ Bill Wellman. An ace pilot before he became a respected filmmaker, Wellman owed his nickname to French servicemen, so impressed were they with his daring raids on German targets. With both courage and talent to spare, it’s no wonder Wellman was able to weave sequences that left cinemagoers reeling. And with no special effects available, the roles of stunt pilot and director became one as everything you see on screen was acted out in the air.
If Wellman’s aerobatics now looks a bit dated, there’s another sense in which Wings is more daring than many a modern action flick. Even in the 2020s, the scarcity of female leads is such than any action film that bucks the trend is a major event. Imagine the surprise, then, when ‘It Girl’ Clara Bow took top billing above the combat aces.
Laying out blueprints that would be followed by everything from the Steve McQueen picture The War Lover to most any Tony Scott film you care to mention, Wings has been somewhat eclipsed by the further exploits of its makers. For as Clara Bow went mad, so William Wellman became an even bigger deal thanks to The Public Enemy and The Ox-Bow Incident. Supporting player Gary Cooper, on the other hand, would become a movie name so vast as to even dwarf the Hollywood sign.
While it still looks pretty good for its age, the true power of Wings lay with the first audiences who watched it. For they had seen the future of action cinema - and in it lay a trip to a galaxy far, far away, an Austrian man with massive muscles and an unpronounceable surname and something called a ‘Keanu Reeves’…