Saturday Matinee Film Festival - Week 1: Wings

A few weeks ago, I was looking through my very lengthy list of "films I need to watch" - I have a list  of movies stored on Evernote, and every time I watch one of the movies on my list I check it off. But I noticed that the list was getting longer and longer, and there weren't many boxes getting checked off. My list and I had Netflix syndrome, and if something wasn't done - soon - it was liable to become chronic. I offhandedly joked to my partner, Scott, that maybe I'd just start watching a movie a week and "slog" my way through the list, but that joke started to seem more and more like a good idea the longer it simmered. A movie a week, one every Saturday...a matinee perhaps? Matinees are such a great way to watch a movie. I remember being a young college student going to movies by myself at the Palace on the Plaza in Kansas City (now permanently closed), usually on a Saturday or Sunday, and walking out of the film blinking into the sunlight with this incredible sense of existential vertigo. Which usually lasted at least the rest of the day and gave me time to digest and at times come to grips with what I had seen. Good movies still do that to me even if I'm watching at home, and, I thought, the matinee experience could be replicated à la quarantine (translate: on my couch with a hot beverage with a cat on my lap). Yeah, why not? Why not make a 52-week film festival at my own house? We don't know how long this pandemic will go; might as well make some plans!

So then it came to deciding what film to start with. Sigh. Starting is always the hardest part. This project needed to start off on the right foot! But then I started thinking: what got me interested in movies in the first place? No, really. I'm not talking about Disney movies I saw as a kid or the blockbusters my parents rented, I'm talking about the feature films that blew me away by showing me what a movie was capable of. George Cukor, David O. Selznick, Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille! These were the moviemakers I used to live for as a young teenager discovering movies. So while my long "gotta watch" list has movies ranging from the Golden Age of Hollywood to the present day, I decided to go back...waaay back, to where it all started. The very first Academy Award Best Picture from the very first Academy Awards in 1929 - Wings.

 I had never really thought about watching the OG of best pictures. Mainly because I'd never really thought about movies from the 1920's, and the silent films I had seen were...okay. But come on, for someone who says they love movies, how can you NOT be interested in knowing where it all started? I found the movie on Amazon to rent, but it was only two dollars more to buy on DVD. So the DVD arrived on Friday, the day before the official launch of my 1-person film festival. I was so excited. You know how often I buy movies these days? Never. I held that thing in my hands and beamed at it like it was a new puppy. And boy, it did not disappoint.

 

I had almost no expectations for this movie and barely knew its plot, other than that it was a World War I movie. It unanimously won best picture in 1929 (even though it was made in 1927 - things were a little weird that first Oscar year) and on that alone I was crossing my fingers I wouldn't be snoring my way through the first Matinee Saturday. I also knew it was (yuck) a silent film. What I didn't know is that it has to this day some of the most incredible air battles and flight sequences ever to be filmed in a motion picture. I'm pretty sure my jaw dropped a few times during the movie, not only because the shots seemed near impossible for 1929, or ever, but also because the scenes were so carefully constructed there was never a single moment in the battles that one ever felt lost or disoriented. There was never a sense of shoddy editing or rushed production or shaky/blurry camerawork. Everything seemed to have been carefully thought through. And the battle scenes - good lord! Any filmmaker who aspires to make a war movie needs to watch this film. The final cuts of both the ground and air battles are so tightly and expertly shot, and with such an enormous cast of an army and airplanes, I thought I was actually watching a real battle. 

In the 30-minute documentary that comes with the DVD, film historians talk about how the producers at Paramount courted the US Army to provide resources for the film in order to help with resources and budgeting. The army ended up contributing land, facilities, troops, and airplanes, estimated in excess of 15 million dollars - which translates to over 220 million in 2020. In terms of resources it's still considered to be one of the most expensive movies ever made (when you account for inflation; a list of most expensive movie budgets not accounting for inflation can be found here). What's also really, really cool is that Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers both learned to fly just for this movie, so they could bolt the electric cameras to the cockpit and film the actors up close. Military pilots were loaned out to do flying formations (which look badass to this day), and the stunt pilots - particularly Dick Grace and Frank Clark - performed the stunts like crashes and evasive maneuvers. Yes, folks: those planes spiraling earthward and doing backflips when they crash are actually happening. No CGI, no models. Think about that for a second. They actually did everything that you see, and believe it or not, no stunt men lost their lives (Dick Grace broke his neck but was back at it within weeks). 

Because the movie is long - two and a halfish hours - I split it into two days. Thankfully and conveniently, right at about the middle mark the filmmakers put an intermission (those were the days!) and so my inaugural Saturday ended up being an inaugural weekend, and I finished it over Saturday and Sunday. The plot is simple enough: two young men who grew up in the same town enlist in the Army and become pilots during World War I, leaving behind a woman they both love but who only loves one back. There is a plot device with mistaken identity, a love triangle, and an unrequited love - which is all fine, just fine. Incidentally, the aviator Howard Hughes was shown the script and called it "sudsy" - too sentimental for his interest, and it was criticized in the media for its conventional sappy plot as well. In fairness, the romantic plotlines aren't the most compelling. What is compelling are the parts about friendship, war, fear, and loss. Not to give away too much, but sudsy plot or no, I was bawling like a baby when I got to the end. 

As a musician, I gotta say a quick bit about the music on this film. This movie had an orchestral soundtrack and special effects written for a live orchestra to accompany this film, which is exactly what happened in New York and LA. Can you imagine going to a movie where a full orchestra is in the house ready to accompany the film? Oh wait, they've started doing that again. The point is, they pulled out all the stops for this movie. No expense was spared when it debuted - and it ended up having a two-year run in theaters. In the restoration of this film (interesting side note: this film was actually lost for many years before a copy of it turned up in a Paris archive in 1992), the score was reorchestrated and re-recorded, and it sounds great. I enjoyed the bits of classical themes thrown in, and if you're looking to brush up on early twentieth century popular music there are a ton of these tunes worked into the soundtrack. In the DVD, there is also an alternate soundtrack of organ music to represent what it would have sounded like in more provincial theaters; that's happening on my second viewing of Wings, whenever that is.

There are so many things I loved about this movie. The battle scenes seem incredibly real, both because they had a ridiculous amount of extras to make the battles feel chaotic and crowded, and because many of the shots are expertly done in towers and at distance to give a sense of scope. Clara Bow is lovely and sympathetic and oh-so-cheesy girl-next-door. Oh, and did I mention this movie has one of the first nude scenes ever shot in a Hollywood film (okay so it's brief and what do we really see? But hey! Progress.) The timings of the airplane flyovers are jaw-dropping. The dying soldiers are Shakespearean, the girls are lovely and over-made-up, and the tragic ending is bittersweet to a tee. It held me captive to the very end and I moped around like a weirdo for a couple of hours after it was over. So if you like movies and want to try something completely different, give this movie a shot. It's worth it. 

On to Week 2!

For further reading on early films and Wings, check out the Wikipedia page for the film, as well as these two books: 

Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (2002: University Press of Kentucky)

The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930 (1997: Simon and Schuster)