Wings (1927)

There's a moment in Wings where two young pilots are tangled in a dogfight high above the Western Front, biplanes spiralling and banking against an open sky, and the camera somehow keeps up with all of it, cutting between cockpits and clouds with a precision and energy that genuinely made me sit forward. For a film made in 1927, with real planes and real stunts and no safety net of digital trickery, it's breathtaking. And then the sequence ends, a title card appears, and my brain quietly reminded me we still had well over an hour to go.

That tension, between awe and endurance, is pretty much my whole experience of Wings. It's the first film ever awarded Best Picture at the Oscars, and watching it nearly a hundred years on, you can feel the weight of that legacy pressing down on every frame. This is a film that wanted to be monumental, and in many ways, it succeeded. The aerial combat sequences are the obvious highlight: sweeping, visceral, impressively choreographed, and shot with a clarity and scale that must have left 1927 audiences completely gobsmacked. Even now, they hold up. Even now, they impress.

Technically, Wings is one of the most advanced silent films I've come across. The cinematography is bold and inventive, full of dramatic lighting, creative angles, and those enormous sweeping compositions that make the air war feel genuinely vast. The performances, broad as they are by modern standards, carry real feeling in the quieter moments. Clara Bow brings warmth and charisma to every scene she's in, and the friendship at the centre of the story, between the two young men heading off to war, feels genuine rather than just functional. There are moments of real tenderness buried in here.

But I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't level with you: this is a tough watch. Two and a half hours of silent cinema, title cards, and a musical score that starts to feel like it's looping after about forty minutes. My brain, thoroughly spoiled by sound and colour and the rhythm of modern editing, started staging a quiet revolt somewhere around the halfway point. The pacing drags. The melodrama tips into the overwrought. Some scenes, stripped of the cultural context in which they were made, simply land flat. It's an endurance test, and I won't pretend otherwise.

The fair thing to do, though, is judge it on its own terms. And on its own terms, as a silent film, Wings sits near the very top. It's the pinnacle of what the form could achieve just as sound was coming along to change everything. I've watched other silents that I found genuinely thrilling, The General being the obvious comparison, and while Keaton's film has an energy and invention that carries it more comfortably across the century, Wings is doing something different in scale and ambition. I also found myself thinking of The Docks of New York, made just a year later, which shows how quickly filmmakers were pushing the form in every direction before the talkies arrived and reset the whole game.

So where does that leave me? Two and a half stars feels right, and I want to be clear about what that does and doesn't mean. It doesn't mean Wings is a bad film. It absolutely isn't. It means I'm being honest about the experience of watching it as a modern viewer rather than writing a respectful essay about its historical importance. As a landmark, it's vital. As a technical achievement, it's impressive. As an emotional experience in flashes, it genuinely works. As a Saturday evening's entertainment, it's hard going.

Watch Wings, by all means. But watch it with patience rather than expectation. Watch it for respect, not for fun, and let those dogfights remind you just how extraordinary it is that any of this exists at all.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 1927  | Watched: 2025-11-10

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from William A. Wellman: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
More from the 1920s: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · The Docks of New York (1928) · A Throw of Dice (1929)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)