TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

bsmith5552 "Wings" has the distinction of being the first movie to win the "Best Picture" Oscar. Many people don't rate it as high as I have, but I fully enjoyed it. I must admit that the story line away from the action scenes, is a little lame at times.Clara Bow who was at the top of her game at the time, heads up the cast. She plays Mary Preston who is in love with neighbor Jack Powell (Charles "Buddy" Rogers) who likes to work on cars instead. Jack along with poor little rich kid David Armstrong (Richard Arlen) are both in love with Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston) whom I assume is also a socialite. Guess who Sylia loves?When the U,S. enters WWI in 1917, the boys sign up for the Army Air Corps and are shipped out to France along with the film's comedy relief Herman Schwimph (Ed Brendel). Before leaving, Sylvia, who loves David, gives Jack her picture unwittingly, giving him a false impression.In France, Jack and David don't at first, get along due to their rivalry but become fast friends once the fighting starts. The two become ace pilots eventually winning a decoration from the French Government for their heroics. Mary, meanwhile has joined the Women's Corps driving a Red Cross truck in, you guessed it, France.After the intermission, we rejoin Jack and David for some fun and merriment in Paris. This is where the story gets a little ridiculous. Jack and Lt. Cameron (Roscoe Karns) are whooping it up amid "the bubbles" when , you guessed it again, Mary shows up. David is too drunk to recognize her so she dresses up in a flapper dress and takes him up to a room in a hotel. Unknown to Jack is the fact that he has been recalled to duty. As Mary is changing to her uniform, two MPs arrive and catch her with her pants down and assume the worst. She is sent back home as a result.And this is where the real action begins. Jack and David are mowing down the German planes when David is shot down and goes into hiding. Jack assumes that he has been killed. Jack soldiers on. Later David still very much alive, manages to steal a German plane and heads for the American lines. As luck would have it, Jack spots the German plane unaware that it is David at the controls and...............................................................................The aerial photography is simply amazing. The dogfights are realistically shown as are the ground war sequences. You have to remember that there were no computers back then so that these sequences were actually shot as you see them. The crashes and various explosions are as real as has ever been shown on the screen.Clara Bow was probably brought on board for her box office appeal because her role is definitely subordinate to that of Rogers and Arlen and the battle scenes. Rogers would go on to marry Mary Pickford in 1937 even though he was many years younger than she. They stayed married until Mary's death in 1979. Richard Arlen had been in movies since the early 20s. He would go on to a lengthy career at Paramount and keep working until his death in 1976.Watch for a young Gary Cooper in a brief role of Cadet White the doomed pilot, Henry B. Walthall as David's father and Hedda Hopper as Jack's mother.A true classic!

aubrimmer This movie was about World War 1. It showed the story of three people. A rich man, a poor one, and a love stricken girl who did her part in the war also. It at first glorified the war and showed how it was every man's dream to fly but then you can see a shift where it shows death in the war and how it can happen really quick. This movie does have a love component to keep the attention of the audience because a movie solely about war can sometimes struggle to keep the audience interested. The movie did a good job of showing the sides of the two soldiers David and Jack but I wish it had shifted its focus a little more towards Mary beyond being in love with Jack. Wings was a good movie and it was well done. The camera work was good and the characters appealing. It also had good character development and good relationships between the characters, mainly David and Jack's friendship. The movie really made you feel and connect with the characters and their plight. I would recommend this movie to anyone who likes silent films and war, it was a well done movie.

DPMay Obviously films made almost a century ago are going to look dated but even so, Wings has not aged particularly well. Certain silent films such as Greed, The Crowd, The Gold Rush, Nosferatu, Safety Last or The Wind are just as effective nowadays as they were when they were first released.The big draw towards Wings back in the Nineteen-Twenties was for its spectacular and innovative depiction of air combat during World War I and for the time these scenes were handled well and largely 'done for real' when there wasn't CGI technology to fall back on. When viewed now, however, the air battles seem overlong and unspectacular, and the constant interruption with descriptive captions hardly helps either. The problem is that they've just been bettered so many times since. Wings couldn't, and doesn't, compare well with something like, say, Pearl Harbor (2001), a modern equivalent in many respects.Luckily, Wings has more going for it than just aerial duels and I found that its strengths lay in its human drama rather than the action scenes as it sports a good cast on top of their game with a plot centred around two friends who are both love rivals for the same girl, a situation complicated further by another girl whose love for one of the protagonists is unrequited.Here and there are some moments of great innovation with the camera and even some unexpected turns of the plot - for example, and most unusually for a war movie of the time, the enemy is not portrayed as wholly evil. Although Wings is essentially a serious film, there are some comedy sequences along the way which I found tedious and unfunny (much involving El Brendel's character). The business with the champagne bubbles extended way past the point of interest. And yet other moments are strangely absent: What happened to Jobyna Ralston's character at the end?A triumph in its day, Wings is still very watchable, but there are other films from the same period which can still offer a much richer viewing experience.

SnoopyStyle It's 1917 in a small town. Jack Powell dreams of flying. Mary Preston is his clingy next door neighbor. He falls for city girl Sylvia Lewis but she's actually in love with David Armstrong from the richest family in town. The boys both join the war and become flyboys. They meet Herman Schwimpf who gets pushed as a flyer but rejoins as a mechanic. They would battle the great German ace Count von Kellermann leader of the Flying Circus. Mary joins the effort as an ambulance driver.The story is weak melodrama with El Brendel trying to inject some comedy. The backstory is old fashion and slow. It's a boring start. The planes, the men and the machineries of war is what this film excels in. The flying footage is terrific and the battles are impressive. The love quadrangle keeps it from truly taking off. Nevertheless, one has to love those planes.