Wings

1927’s Wings was the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. At that first ceremony though there were two categories which were seen as the top award of the night. Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans won Unique and Artistic Production while Wings won Outstanding Picture. The former category was dropped the following year and Outstanding Picture was renamed Best Picture with Wings retroactively considered the overall winner. This seems unfair on Sunrise which in my view is a far superior film which is why I have included it on my Oscar Challenge page.

But back to the matter in hand which is the film Wings. The movie blends elements from a number of genres including action and comedy but is centrally a romantic drama. I say this despite lead actress Clara Bow’s statement that the film was “A man’s picture” in which she played the cream on top of the pie. For me the film is deeper than purely “A man’s picture” and has a highly engaging story about feuding rivals and unrequited love set against the backdrop of the First World War. As America enters the war in 1917 it calls its men to arms and Jack Powell (Charles ‘Buddy’ Rodgers) and David Armstrong (Richard Arlen) answer the call to join the fledgling Air Service. Both men are in love with Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston) and vie for her affections. She only has eyes for David. Meanwhile Jack’s beautiful neighbour Mary Preston (Clara Bow) is madly in love with Jack but he barely notices her and the feelings are in no way reciprocated. While in France the two men become friends and forget their feud but their love for the same woman remains as an undercurrent of their friendship.

The Public Enemy

One of the earliest true gangster films, The Public Enemy charts the rise and fall of gangsters Tom Powers (James Cagney) and Matt Doyle (Edward Woods) through the first third of the twentieth century. From street hoodlums tripping up girls in 1909 to prohibition era bootleggers, Powers and Doyle become top dogs in a world of crime, money, women and violence before getting their studio orchestrated comeuppance.

The movie starts with some fantastic streets scenes set in the first few years of the twentieth century. Anyone who has read my reviews of Chaplin films or other early cinema will know what a huge fan I am of seeing these sorts of shots, especially if they’re real. Here they look like sets but are still great. Early on there is a sort of Oliver-Fagan dynamic featuring Putty Nose (Murray Kinnell) as a gangster who employs children to do his thieving. It is soon obvious that he is ripping them off and the two boys strike out on their own. Although the film was produced in the pre-code era the violence is very tame by today’s standards and my DVD copy was rated as PG. The story is the driving force here though and the plot has been repeated numerous times in both versions of Scarface, the similarly titled Public Enemies and countless others.