Best Picture Series - Wings (1927) Review

Evan D.

I watch a lot of movies every year. Just in 2024, my wife — Anna — and I watched over 350, with almost half of those being brand new releases. To help compensate for the deluge of new films, we try to focus our home viewing on little projects. Last year we decided to watch all of the Disney Animation Studio catalogue and Pixar features. We found it a cool thing to do together, a great way to fill in some blank spots and a dispiriting tour of the downfall of a studio once devoted to artistry that now puts out whatever the hell Moana 2 was. But I digress. This year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Wicked??? (hopefully not Wicked.)

Wings, directed by William A. Wellman and released in 1927 was the first winner of the Best Picture Academy Award and the only silent film to ever win. Set in the throws of the First World War, the picture follows two young men, Jack (Charles Rogers) and the wealthy David (Richard Arlen), who both pursue the same young woman before they are sent off to war. In flight school the two rivals become fast friends and an aviation team on the front lines fighting the Germans. Meanwhile Jack’s neighbor, Mary (Clara Bow) harbors a tremendous crush on him and joins the army as an ambulance driver to stay close by.

Its sort of an oddity of history, a massively budgeted silent picture in a time where “talkies” were already gaining traction, a war story about camaraderie with “it girl” Clara Bow sort of shoehorned in to add some star power. Despite all that, Wings still works and holds up on the strength of really captivating filmmaking. Most of us have probably seen some of the more famous sequences like the camera seamlessly floating over a line of tables in a bar, but this movie is packed with moments that still feel really magical. Hundreds of extras on the battlefields and camps make scenes of war look genuinely inhabited. Some of the work with the planes in battle holds up even 100 years later. 

Wings is more than just impressive for its time, it is a well paced well written piece of cinema too. It’s funnier than you might be imagining, one recurring joke sees an American recruit with a Germanic last name showing off his American Flag tattoo as the National Anthem plays behind him to win over skeptical supervisors. The relationship between Jack and David plays well too. You can feel the disdain they have for one another at first and their bond by the end of the fill is nicely developed. 

If anything about Wings feels dated it has to be the story itself. War narrative and depictions on the heels of WWI were popular — All Quiet on the Western Front would win Best Picture just 2 ceremonies later — and this one at times veers propagandistic. For all its attempts to depict the horrors of war, the focus more often tends to be on the heroism of the pilots. The film actually begins with a quote of admiration for the pilots of WWI from none other than noted anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh. That aforementioned table shot in the bar too introduces a sequence that ends with Bow fighting another woman for a drunken Jack’s affection. 

On balance, the first Best Picture winner is a quite engaging war story with a great cast and a lot of special sequences, even as some of it feels a bit out of touch. Some can be attributed to the wash of time but at its heart, Wings is a film with more admiration for the pilots it honors than disdain for the war they were fighting to begin with. A very good film that any cinephile should seek out. 8/10