WINGS screens in Cleveland, Ohio at Cleveland Silent Film Festival

The inaugural Cleveland Silent Film Festival and Colloquium, which kicks off this weekend, will screen Wings, one of the great films of the silent era. Along with Wings, the Festival is also set to screen Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), starring Buster Keaton, The Wedding March (1929), starring Erich von Stroheim, and Sunrise (1927), starring Janet Gaynor. Click to access the Festival's Facebook Page which contains information on the various screenings and concerts as well as ticket information.

I was honored that the Cleveland Silent Film Festival published my essay on Wings in their festival program. I also penned a piece for the local Cleveland, Ohio patch entitled "WINGS to screen at Cleveland Silent Film Festival: First Oscar winner was the most popular film in the city in the 1920s".

On Friday, February 18, the newly launched Cleveland Silent Film Festival will screen Wings, a film which holds two unique distinctions; it was the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. And secondly, Wings can rightly claim to have been the most popular film shown in Cleveland in the 1920s. 

If that isn't enough to pique your interest, this blockbuster film will be shown with a newly recorded reconstruction of the lavish musical score first heard at the film's 1927 premiere. That score was composed by J.S. Zamecnik, a Cleveland-born composer widely regarded as one of the leading film composers of his time.

 

If you have never seen a silent film, Wings is the best place to begin. It is thrilling. The film is set during World War I, and stars "It" girl Clara Bow, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, Richard Arlen, and El Brendel. The latter two play pilots, as does Gary Cooper, who appears in a small role which helped launch his legendary career.

What sets Wings apart are the battles in the sky. Before Wings, there had been some aerial warfare shown in films, though actors were not seen in actual flight. Up to that time, in fact, many aerial scenes had been shot in stationary planes on the ground.

Director William A. Wellman, himself a decorated veteran of WWI, set out to achieve what no one else had attempted. Under Wellman's direction, a large number of cameramen shot close-ups of flyers from the rear cockpits of planes while following dogfights from a near squadron-worth of camera planes. Wellman and his cameramen also devised other daring new techniques, and, at times, even had the film's stars pilot their own planes while controlling mounted, motor-driven cameras that faced them.

The results were, in the words of the critics of the time, "amazing," "impressive," "startling" and "stupendous." Notably, Wings also won an Academy Award for best Engineering (aka best visual effects). 

Accompanied by a twenty-piece orchestra, Wings debuted in Cleveland at the old Colonial theater (Superior Ave. near E. 9th St.) on April 8, 1927. The film was a smash hit. 

An advertisement  (see above) in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer proclaimed "Cleveland Taken by Storm," while Ward Marsh, the newspaper's well regarded film critic, declared Wings, "one of the greatest pictures of the year – one of the great pictures in celluloid history."

By all accounts, Wings proved extremely popular in the Ohio city. The film's limited engagement was extended again and again. At a time when most new films played only a week, Wings enjoyed a record setting 13 week run, eclipsing an earlier local record setter, D.W. Griffith's Way Down East, by one week.

Besides its singular greatness as a silent film, there are are few other reasons to see Wings. One reason is that it is the work of director William A. Wellman, whose credits include the 1928 Louise Brooks film, Beggars of Life. (Both films also star Richard Arlen.) Released within about one year of one another, the two films sometimes followed each other across America, following one another in theaters when shown in various cities. There are also one or two scenes in Wings which clearly influenced the staging of certain scenes in the 1927 Louise Brooks' film, Now We're in the Air. It too was set in World war I, and though a comedy, included scenes set near the front lines. I am thinking of scenes in both films which include downward shots from an observation balloon basket.