Best Picture Marathon: Wings (1927)

As a family, we have long been interested in movies of (almost) all sorts and are a bit geeky about things like the Academy Awards. We've been talking for quite awhile about trying to watch the Academy Award Best Pictures in order and finally watched our first one last night. What really helped with getting this marathon started is that our local library has almost every Best Picture winner in their DVD collection.

Wings  PG13  2 hours, 24 minutes  
Director: William A. Wellman

Starring: Clara Bow, Charles Rogers, Richard Arlen and Gary Cooper

Wings is the epic story of two young men, Jack and David, who are in love with the same woman, Sylvia, and Mary, who is in love with Jack. Jack and David head off to war as bitter rivals, but end up becoming the best of friends as fighter pilots on the front lines in the last days of World War I.

Most of our family are not enthusiastic about silent films. The overall sentiment was that this was a bit overly long and dated, even though there were some great laugh-out-loud moments.

Bernie commented that Wings was the least silent film she's ever watched, because the restored version that we rented on Amazon had constant music plus lots of added sound effects.

Ria's impression was that movie-making of the time was still in transition from books - because the captions were so lengthy and descriptive.


It's fair to watch Wings for its historical value, but you can also pick up some context by watching this documentary (we haven't finished watching it yet). A couple of interesting tidbits we learned from it were that the director himself was a World War I fighter pilot and the movie was the famous Edith Head's first as lead costumer (Edith Head was the inspiration behind Edna "E" Mode from The Incredibles). Look for the other 3 parts of the documentary on Youtube...