Wings (1927)

I caught a free Veterans Day screening of this first Best Picture winner at AFI Silver in Silver Springs, MD with live piano accompaniment. There was a fifteen minute intermission (the second half of the movie is much more exciting), but this pianist played 2.5 hours of music synced to a silent movie, turning her own pages, vamping a bit. It was very impressive. The composer was apparently a student of Dvorak. It is consequentially very melodic. In a silent movie, facial expressions and music have to pull double duty to convey emotion.

This early movie is not just a war film. It is a melodramatic character study. There are a significant number of non-battle scenes that show character evolution. I must say, I was not a fan of our hero, Jack. I know he's supposed to be our American hero, but he treats everyone terribly. Sylvia and David tiptoe around him so as not to hurt his feelings while he has no regard for theirs. I know he's supposed to be the scrappy hero that gets the girl, but he doesn't deserve any of this. He even gets Mary fired! And he can't hold his liquor--that was a weird scene. Also, they get away with some stuff in this pre-Code era.

Visually, it is a very impressive movie. There is the famous scene at the nightclub, with the rigged camera that moves towards our hero seemingly pushing straight through a set of tables and guests. The early scene with the camera on the swing is charming. The climactic battle scene is extraordinary. The number of extras alone, before computers could generate them, is astounding. You see them shooting guns and dropping bombs, crashing planes and causing all this destruction, and you wonder, how did they not kill anyone? It looks so real because it is--how did they do that? And then after reading Wikipedia, I discovered they actually did kill someone. There were two accidents, one fatal. I was even wondering how they got these huge 1920s era cameras on planes? The aerial dog-fighting scenes are incredible for the 1920s. Dunkirk, being in the computer era, is comparatively less impressive. The gunfire is painted in red onto the film, which I'm guessing was only in the restoration.