Three for WINGS.

I WANTED WINGS.

I’ve thought of William Wellman’s 1927 Wings as one of the all time best films since I first saw it fifty years back so I came at the showings of the 2012 restoration nervously. I needn’t have worried. I was damp eyed by the time they got to the fourth of the Paramount mountains in the prologue.

With this film, director Wellman imposed himself on a project which dwarfed the production line movies he had done before. Though he didn’t originate Wings, once selected for his WW1 aviator background, he dominated the end result. This was a film that he was still proud of at the end of his career, after he had put together  four decades of masterpieces spaced with engaging programmers - Beggars of Life, So Big, The Public Enemy, Wild Boys of the Road, College Coach, Central Airport, The Hatchet Man, Heroes for Sale, A Star Is Born, Beau Geste, Nothing Sacred,  The Oxbow Incident, The Story of G.I. Joe, Yellow Sky, Across the Wide Missouri and Island In the Sky (you decide which are which) - along with his share of  clunkers. This is well on the way to being the most impressive output of any film maker.

Wellman orchestrated the script’s dramatic rise and fall - small town America, training, first combat flights (interval) the frantic Paris break, the drama of “the Big Push” and a return to home. 

Wings - Shooting Star

 We open with kids next door Charles Buddy Rogers (who they don’t show in the new trailer!) modifying his factory car for speed to the admiration of Clara Bow, at twenty five already showing traces of her hard life but still managing irresistibly bubbly. Her kicking her heels on the lawn is the business they steal for Anne Baxter’s 1949 silent movie simulation in You’re My Everything. However Charles Buddy only has eyes for Jobyna Ralston (with Harold Lloyd in his best features) who in turn is an item with well to do Richard Arlen, busily  pushing her swing with  the camera mounted on it as it reveals Buddy arriving to take Jobyna for a spin.

Comes the nation’s call and the boys sign up along with El Brendel for pilot training of which we get some effective documentation - throwing up after being in the rotating gimbals, physical jerks, boxing  and the rest. The boys are shipped out for flight training which darkens the tone of the piece effectively.

When we get to Europe and the first dawn patrol, the dog fight, the piece of course comes into it’s own with the Gotha bomber attacking Mervale - great shot from above of it and it’s two escort planes taking off in the dust. All the high tech. effects work which would be used on this material later can’t match the excitement of real planes actually in the air together. That first genuine bi-plane crash is still breath catching

We hear about Kellerman / the Von Richthofen character’s chivalry in not bringing down a flyer whose machine gun had jammed but that doesn’t extend to not shooting up (not all that convincingly) downed pilots.

The interval is part of the structure with the film resuming with a change of tone which would have been disturbing butted straight on. My rough timing corresponded to the 141 minutes the restoration is supposed to clock in at and it is running marginally fast - the aerial footage was deliberately undercranked. I don’t recall the scene of snatching the white parasol in front of the Arc de Triomphe in earlier versions. This looked like a complete copy and we were so lucky to get it. A repeating feature of screenings is people saying they had no idea how long the film had taken to watch.

Wings - Marchal, Rogers and bubbles

The Paris material kicks off with that tracking shot through the cafe couples - one of which is lesbian - that makes it into all the compilations and gets A.E.F. girl Clara back into the action, momentarily topless. The different reactions of the military police duo come for Buddy are a treat. Back under canvas, there’s the misunderstanding over Jobyna’s inscribed photo and more aviation action, with the hokey dramatic climax. By this time they could have had Dick and Buddy as space men trying to go home and I would have still accepted it.

The film craft is kicking in. The Shooting Star on Buddy’s car and plane give impact to the Iron Cross symbol on the German fighter. The officer kissing the cheeks of the heroes he’s giving medals sets up what is incorrectly called the first male on male kiss in movies, with peasant woman Margery Chapin’s reaction cut in to take the curse off it. Add in the propeller coming to a stop.

Find another bromance that is so explicit and so effective in movies. Wellman enjoyed pushing this to the edge of the homoerotic line without falling over. It’s much more compelling than covert gay relationships in the films of Tay Garnet (Slightly Honourable, The Big Haircut / Wild Harvest) or Sam Fuller (I Shot Jesse James, House of Bamboo) and they all seem to have coasted past the censors they were designed to provoke.

The final return to a brass band welcome (compare John Cromwell’s unjustly neglected The Mighty of  two years later) still retains attention and mixes irony, triumph and regret in exactly the measures to make the film resonant. I like Dunkirk but this one leaves it standing. Christopher Nolan must have been familiar with the precedent of Wings and his film has the same stance - only showing the combatants with no one higher than a field officer appearing and no consideration of the motives or justification for their wars. Combat may be an extraordinary experience but there is nothing heroic about it, with death coming without reason.

 

Wings is of a piece. Its preposterous sentimentality and melodrama are the engines that drive it. Beyond it’s qualities as entertainment and spectacle is it’s ability to draw the viewer back into the mind set of  the people who first watched it more than a decade before I was born. Even more so than brilliant, then contemporary, work like Lonesome, Asphalt or The Wind, this one registers because it is a pipe line into the attitudes of it’s day and even people who don’t understand that can still be mesmerised by it.

Julian Johnson’s (Docks of New York, The Way of All Flesh) intertitles never attract comment but he was the master of this short lived craft, even more so than Thomas Ince’s celebrated C. Gardner Sulivan. “These young warriors of the sky whose wings are folded about them forever.” The flying scenes would be incomprehensible without his work which never comes as an interruption. “Zooming upward to pour a stream of fire into the belly of the monster.” As superimposed captions these later worked nicely in sound documentary but his career still ground to a halt.

Veteran Harry Perry’s principal photography is mainly unostentatious with only the odd flourish (the swing, the cafe track) but he was surrounded by a small army of  portable Akely camera wielding photographers, Russell Harlan, William Clothier, Ernest Lazlo and George Stevens among them. The cutting is spot on.

Roy Pomeroy’s early downwards model shot crash is pretty feeble and when they later pile the real plane into a full size church, Wellman’s lot make a point of having an actor run into the shot before the edit, to establish that there’s no faking.

Wings - William A. Wellman

 The support cast is intriguing.  The dreadful El Brendel is quite acceptable here though he is largely replaced by character comic Roscoe Karns in the second half. Bit parts include Hedda Hopper as Rogers’ mum, director Charles Barton chatting up Bow, Wellman himself calling out that the planes may be of use after all from the battle field, Henry B. Walthall (Birth  of a Nation’s Little Colonel) asserting himself in a wheel chair and the Paris floozy is elegant Arlette Marchal (Michael Curtiz’ Princess Urseti in Moon of Israel - good luck trying to see her other work). Which one is Thomas Carr and is that George Chandler exiting the recruiting office? Of course the stand out is Gary Cooper whose one minute turn launched him on the greatest star career in movies.

Wings - Arlen and Cooper.

The new sound track uses an original first run score by J.S. Zamecnik who produced a lot of the sheet music played with silent films. It mixes pop songs of the day, most of which are now forgotten and come across as original music, along with his Mendelssohn selections. Forty years before Stanley Kubric, Mr. Zamencnik put classical music on flight footage. We  spot “None But the Lonely Heart”, “Dark Town Strutters’ Ball” and particularly in the Paris scene’s “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”  All this has been impeccably orchestrated and re-recorded.

I was worried by the news that Skywalker had added in an effects track but this has been confined to motor noise and blasts and works remarkably well. The people who did this obviously knew what they were about.

The image is slightly grainy but the irregularities in the texture caused by second generation negative, notably in the Bubbles sequence, have been largely ironed out and the piece simulates the original tinting. The only way to improve on this result would be to have a first run 35 mil. ortho copy playing with a live orchestra. We have the moon. Let’s not ask for the stars.

Well what happened? I don’t know about Melbourne where it played half a dozen venues but at the Chauvel it drew single figure audiences. The night I went there were three people, one who came on the recommendation of his ninety year old mum. What did the proprietors expect? No question of core audience. There hasn’t been a half way serious Cinematheque in Sydney since 1978. It’s doubtful that even people here who turned out in escalating numbers as word of mouth spread for the Gaumont retrospective are still about. Palace put up a poster in the foyer and listed it in their press advts. (at least they still do press advts.) Where was the feature on the ABC, the two page article in the Herald, the ticket give-aways on radio, the guru extolling it on morning TV? Who have they got could do justice to this one anyway?

We know that this neglect of  serious film has drained Australian production but what
must it’s effect be on the understanding of wider, less obviously connected areas?