Wings

Well, thanks to an inter-library loan, I finally got my hands on a copy of Wings, the very first Best Picture winner ever. I'm not going to lie, I thought I was going to have to buy a cheap copy of it on Amazon. Many thanks to the library here at school for helping me find it. However, it did come in VHS form, and my lowly house does not contain a working VCR. As if I wasn't dorky enough, I had to go to the library once again, check out a media study room, and watch the entire 2 hour and 10 minute silent film by myself. I guess for a silent film venue, I went to the right spot. While this was moderately sucky, I did feel a certain amount of satisfaction after it was over.

Anyway, I'm no silent film connoisseur, but I thought it was decent. The movie tells the story of two men who, although they are both in love with the same woman, go off to World War I and become fighter pilots together, ending up as BFFs. The story itself is pretty basic. Our naive main character doesn't realize the love he already has in his next-door neighbor, the glamour of the other woman is too alluring, etc., etc. The reason the movie was as exciting as it was is its use of actual footage of fighter plane dogfights. From what I've read, the U.S. War Department fully supported the making of this film, which glamorized WWI with the longest, most tedious fight scenes I've ever witnessed. I mean, really, the extras they had for this were just atrocious; they looked more like zombies than soldiers scurrying across a battlefild. Ultimately, this movie probably won Best Picture because of its for-the-time dazzling visual effects more than its acting and so on.

Even with that in mind, though, this doesn't necessarily detract from the movie. I really did feel for Jack, David, and Mary (Jack's girl-next-door). Ok, so David kind of freaked me out a bit; there's just something about his horrifying gaze that rarely changed in expression that filled me with terror. He really looked like he was going to kill something all the time. And he also kind of French-kissed his mother, which I was also not okay with.

Ok, so my modern sensibilities kind of got to me on this movie. Frankly, Wings has not aged terribly well. The plot is trite and sexist (Mary ends up being sent home from the Women's Corp in order to save Jack's good name), and I had a really hard time getting over myself as a viewer to appreciate this movie. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. I know the visual effects were great for their time, and they were. This movie-watching experience was more of an historical event than anything else. I feel like that's the most important thing to take from this movie anyway. You certainly won't remember the dialogue.

Well, there's Wings for you. I'm working on inter-library loaning Cavalcade, and I've got Cimarron sitting on my desk right now. I just counted, and that's 74 down and only seven more to go. Happy watching!