Military-Entertainment Complex: Soaring Spectacle and Plummeting Propaganda

It seems “Wings” is best (mis)remembered as supposedly “the first Best Picture Oscar winner,” even though it was a retroactive decision to equate either one of the two top picture awards for the inaugural Academy Awards with the sole top prize of Best Picture in subsequent ceremonies. “Sunrise” (1927) won the “other Best Picture,” the “artistic” one, that initial awards season. Basically, the producers of “Wings” were given a statuette for making the movie that made the most money at the box office in the 1927-1928 theatrical season. More importantly, though, who cares; it’s not like it even faced competition in the nominations from the other best popular American pictures that season, let alone any foreign films. “The Jazz Singer” (1927) and “The Circus” (1928) were too special to even be allowed to compete, apparently. The other two that were nominated in the category—I’ve seen them; they’re not very good. Anyways, it’s the sort of ahistorical history that can lead to, say, director William A. Wellman’s son writing some nonsense about “Wings” supposedly being the last great silent film—it did win “Best Picture” for the only silent Oscars, after all—or that it was the “Star Wars” (1977) of its day and even though I’d say it’s more prescient of the Spielbergian mode, but I’ll get to that later.

A more interesting tract is to view “Wings” within the context of the films that inspired it and that it in turn subsequently influenced. Masha Shpolberg, for one (see Works Cited), has framed the picture this way. Moreover, one may see then how, besides hardly being “the last great silent film” (c’mon: “The Crowd,” “The Docks of New York,” “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” “Un Chien Andalou,” “The Wind,” (all 1928), “A Cottage on Dartmoor,” “The Man with a Movie Camera,” “Pandora’s Box” (all 1929), “City Lights” (1931), Ozu, “The Goddess” (1934), “Modern Times” (1936), etc.), “Wings” was never entirely a “silent” film to begin with and, indeed, was one of those films circa 1927 to pioneer recorded synchronized soundtracks of sound effects and a score, if not as with this case dialogue. Warner Bros. may get most of the credit, from “Don Juan” (1926) through “The Jazz Singer” and to “The Singing Fool” (1928) for recording scores and sound effects and, eventually, song and dialogue on discs, and Fox with their Movietone sound-on-film newsreels, but there’s also this roadshow blockbuster from one of the other major Hollywood studios, Paramount, who had otherwise agreed to wait on talkies until they all agreed on the technology that Warners and Fox were testing on the market.

Point is, sound became another part of the spectacle, along with the visual, whether the aerial photography, war scenes, aviation stunt work, Handschiegl color process for fire from machine guns and the smoking planes their bullets hit, or a glimpse of Clara Bow’s mammaries (and male buttocks being examined in another scene, to be fair). The vrooms of plane engines and rat-a-tat-tats of the gunfire as part of the “cinema of attractions” in the sense defined by film theorist Tom Gunning and with only a threadbare narrative so as not to interfere. This is also important to note because “Wings” essentially is a culmination of two cinematic trends. One is the WWI film, with the most successful template then being offered by “The Big Parade” (1925), although I also like the casting here of Henry B. Walthall as the crippled father of one of the soldiers—alluding, inadvertently or not, to that primary and controversial American Civil War epic, “The Birth of a Nation” (1915). The other trend began simultaneously with the talkies, of the era’s craze for airplanes set off by Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, the propeller-shrieking launching and speechifying ceremonies afterwards of which were captured by Fox Movietone, as I’ve previously reviewed and which Shpolberg also examines. “Wings” even begins appropriately enough by quoting Lindbergh. The spectacle of aviation, including the sounds, meets that favored topic of late silent cinema of memorializing the Great War.

Unfortunately, as here, that memorializing tends to lead to patriotic pomp and valorization of sending a generation to slaughter for no good reason. Spoiler alert, you screwed up and got your “good” war with an even bigger bloodbath. Especially sad is how cinema played a part in vindicating the First World War, when, including in the U.S., it was widely viewed at the time as an utter disaster that should’ve been easily avoided. I mean, President Woodrow Wilson was reelected on the promise of keeping the states out of Europe’s aristocratic shenanigans, and after he lied and reneged he was ultimately dissuaded from running for office again by historically high public disapproval of his administration—leading the opposition party to what continues to this day to be the biggest presidential landslide victory in the history of American democracy. I don’t know if anyone ever really loved Warren G. Harding, but it seems obvious many sure hated Wilson and WWI.

So, seven some years later and here comes Hollywood begging the U.S. Army for free resources to make their big war-plane picture, and seeing the propagandist opportunities, Uncle Sam was all too willing to subsidize “Wings.” The making-of-doc included with the home video restoration of the film suggests the value of the government’s aid here amounted to as much as $15 million in 1927 monies. Paramount “only” spent some $2 million on it, and the film is said to have made maybe $4 million at the domestic box office—and that was the most expensive production not even counting subsidies and biggest box-office hit of the year. Hard meets soft power in what around that time had just become the most powerful nation in the world. Y’know, because the European powers had just blown each other up with America’s belated help. It’s no coincidence that only with the war did Hollywood come to dominate the box office, either; before that, believe it or not, films from France’s Pathé and Gaumont, or Denmark’s Nordisk and Italian epics were serious competition in American cinemas—that changed after the war. And long before “Top Gun” (1986), this was the beginning of the U.S. military-entertainment complex.

Other aviation films, talkies more influenced by “Wings” than by “The Jazz Singer,” were quick to follow suit. Shpolberg’s essay, for instance, also examines “Lilac Time” (1928), “Plane Crazy” (1929), “Hell’s Angels” (1930), “Dawn Patrol” (1930 and 1938), and “Christopher Strong” (1933). Heck, having recently rewatched “Top Gun,” I’m hard pressed to find where it might’ve improved upon aerial photography of government war planes flying around—and its excuse of a narrative is even thinner than that of “Wings” and its reliance on a score to propel its visuals somehow even more dependent than that of a dialogue-free silent film. At least, the “Maverick” sequel (2022) exploits today’s digital IMAX techniques for spectacle, but then exhibition of “Wings” is said to have originally featured Magnascope technology that would magnify the action during the dog-fight scenes to fill the entire screen, so not even IMAX is all that new of a notion. (Unlike the film’s lost recorded soundtrack and coloring, the 2012 restoration seems not to have attempted to replicate this effect.)

Perhaps ironically, it would take the talkies to at least for a bit put an end to this cinematic propagandizing of WWI as not entirely awful (“Welcome to a very merry little war”). Too bad that by then, with a film such as “All Quiet of the Western Front” (1930), it was already too late, including Joseph Goebbels and company doing their damndest to not let Germans see it. It’s also too bad because much of what there is of a narrative in “Wings” is actually pretty good, if not sometimes admirable. The love triangle is a tried and true metaphor for war and an opportunity of an enemy of mistaken identity missed, leveraged better before by the likes of Abel Gance with “J’Accuse!” (1919). There’s some attempt to (re)humanize Germans and German-Americans, although this is largely for naught as the Dutchman soldier serving as comic relief becomes quite literally a punching bag. The casting of Bow, too, for her star box-office appeal, “Wings” benefiting ever more as it would come on the heels of the success of the New Woman rom-com “It” (1927), has the added bonus of highlighting a female character’s wartime bravery amidst the otherwise male-dominated heroics. Not even the first “Top Gun” had that, as the Department of Defense put their foot down on officer fraternizing (hence the female co-star being a civilian contractor instead). “Wings,” thus, seems comparatively modern in its frank depiction of a woman suffering in self-sacrifice under such militarized sexual codes.

Plus, Bow is great in this despite how frequently she’s called upon for tears and that her character seems like an afterthought (because it was) that’s ancillary, superfluous to the main narrative, could be entirely excised without harming it. Funny, then, that she partly saves the story and characterizations from being completely bland when not taking place above the clouds. I especially love how she plays a hometown girl who pretends in one scene to be an urban flapper—when in fact Bow’s entire star image was really that of a flapper, the “It girl.” Pretty sure, too, that she was the master of the flirting pose of lying on her stomach while kicking her legs; see her on a desk in “It” to confirm. Nice cinematography on the ground, as well, with the entire background receding into soft focus during her close-ups as she’s the only thing to see even if her oblivious love interest doesn’t know it. Too bad her subsequent effort with Wellman, “Ladies of the Mob” (1928), is now lost.

Plenty of innovative and interesting filmmaking here even when not in the air: the focus on the real future of the world with the automobile, the swing shot and all the imagery early on of youth and love “in bloom” like the scenery, the dolly shots, especially the hanging one climbing over or seemingly through the tables (including one seating a lesbian couple, it would appear), the bubbly bubbles, the last cigarettes, the trenches and the tanks. The fatalism is effective, including a memorable bit turn from a pre-stardom Gary Cooper. There’s even a brief mention of the Influenza pandemic, which is shamefully not always the case with these things. It even beats Steven Spielberg and his Reece’s Pieces to the punch on candy product placement (even turning the Hershey wrapper over to display the name, which allegedly is the only advertising the company used to do in the past—insist that employees turn the wrappers over as such when they find them littering anywhere) as well as in obsessing over the imagery of “shooting stars.”

Granted, though, it’s the action “on the high sea of heavens” that’s the main draw here, and it doesn’t disappoint. The clouds, the planes over the hill and land battles, biplane dog fights, a bomber and airships, too, color, sound, fake blood spouting out, and the studio was smart and brave enough to hire the only director they had who was a veteran pilot and despite his relative cinematic inexperience (e.g. check out his prior work on “The Boob” (1926)---dreadful film), and they got the right cameramen and stuntmen, too, and trained actors Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlan to fly, as they all invented how to film in the sky. If one can ignore or overlook the co-opting of such footage for militaristic propaganda, it's an entertaining spectacle.

Works Cited
Shpolberg, Masha. “Lindbergh’s Engine: Hollywood’s Transition to Sound and the Aviation Film.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 39, no. 4 (2019): 663-686.

Wellman Jr., William. The Man and His Wings: William A. Wellman and the Making of the First Best Picture. Praeger, 2006.

(Added to my list of pandemic-related titles.)