Wings

A large-scale consideration of the Great War as buzzing hornet's nest, William Wellman leaps right in. Small-town boy (Charles "Buddy" Rogers) loves big-city beauty (Jobyna Ralston) who loves brooding fancy-pants (Richard Arlen), the fellas enlist for aerial combat in Europe and the tomboy next door (Clara Bow) follows suit in ambulance. (A parallel trajectory traces the metamorphosis from hot-rod to fighter airplane to actual shooting star.) Barracks training "as exciting as going back to school" then wings for the Yanks, the camera is mounted on the cockpit so the horizon seesaws with each loop and spiral. Tinted celluloid for machine-gun blasts above the clouds, a dogfight with a German flier ends with a salute, "there was chivalry between these knights of the air." Leave in Paris is an oneiric interlude, quick as Clair and twice as jocular: A bravura dolly shot at the Folies Bergère pushes across table after table (past a dapper Sapphic duo and an officer getting a drink thrown in his face) to find Rogers entranced by animated champagne bubbles, the Battle of Saint-Mihiel is the hangover. Seizing the huge production by the scruff of the neck, Wellman gazes down from hot-air balloons and up from the trenches for flashes of fatalism to crack the boys-adventure ebullience. (An image from Gance has a uniformed corpse sprawled on top of rocks painted into the Iron Cross.) Amid all this, two minutes of Gary Cooper—he pauses at his tent's entrance and smiles in close-up, suddenly it's like discovering a lost picture of young Lincoln. "See them aloft, see them in the distance..." Hawks in The Dawn Patrol has the bitter distillate, Wellman in Lafayette Escadrille the sadder, wiser reflection. With El Brendel, Richard Tucker, Gunboat Smith, Henry B. Walthall, Roscoe Karns, Julia Swayne Gordon, and Arlette Marchal. In black and white.