Oscars Retrospective: Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1st Academy Awards Review)

    Once a year, every year, for the past 94 years (actually 93 years and it hasn’t always happened once a year but more on that later), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences convenes to host a stellar show that honors the greatest and most artistic and influential films of the past 365 days. Or at least, that’s what they would like to say.

In reality, once a year, every year, for the past 94 years (actually 93 years and it hasn’t always happened once a year but more on that later), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences convenes to host an execrable waste of entertainment that is basically a popularity contest for the rich and famous. Any young burgeoning filmmaker who has come of age in the past generation who is aware of the Academy Awards will have grown up deeply questioning the wisdom of their choices.

Hell, I was that wannabe filmmaker. Pretty much from the age when I first got into movies (let’s say high school or so), I’ve always considered the Academy choices to be tending to always make the wrong choice. And the older I get, the more people I talk to tend to agree with me. But as I talked to more and more people, there were two statements that always seemed to pop up:

1. Yeah they always make bad choices, don’t they?

and/or:

2. When did it end up the way it did?

These are the two questions that inspired this blog series. First, is the key word “always.” They always make bad choices. Like every single one? Every single movie that won the Academy Award was a bad choice? And from there how do you quantify a good choice and a bad choice for the objectively best movie of the year? What does and does not qualify as a good versus bad choice? And, for that matter, what percentage of the movies that won the Academy Awards actually did deserve it? Is it 50 deserved, 50 didn’t? 60-40? 60-40 the other way?

The second one is a far less nebulous question and one that we can easily dispel within the first few installments of this blog. In the United States especially, there is this big romanticism that applies to Hollywood movies from the 1950s and earlier. It brings us back to a simpler time when filmmaking was filmmaking and the pioneers of the industry set the stage for everyone else today. This romanticism largely comes from the fact that the average person is not likely to watch a film older than the 1960s aside from the main staples (The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, any of the Disney films) and the only people who are still alive from that era will be looking back with rose-colored glasses.  Believe me when I say that when you’ve watched as many films from the Golden Age of Hollywood as I have to write this series, you’ll quickly realize that just as many movies sucked back then as they do now.

So join me, dear reader, in my journey through film history as I review each and every single movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture and analyze whether they truly deserved to win or if it was a snub choice based on studio politics. First off, a few caveats.

One, this is very much what you would call pop history. I am not a college professor with a Ph.D. in film studies who works at Yalevardlumbia. And there are admittedly a lot of inferences made here. Any true historian will tell you to question everything you’re told and to take any inferences with a grain of salt. I’m not doing that since my knowledge of human nature makes it pretty easy to add 2 plus 2. But still, this series is very much meant to be seen as just fun; if someone else says something to contradict me, feel free to believe them instead.

Also, most of the research for these reviews revolved around me watching just about every major film made in the past 100 years and compiling my thoughts. I touch on a lot of iconic and influential films, as well as films that have since been forgotten, but it’s impossible to talk about them all. If I missed anything (and I’d be very surprised if I did since most of the list was ripped from Roger Ebert’s Great Movies List, the American Film Institute, the National Library of Congress and the Criterion Collection), my apologies.

And, finally, remember that any of the opinions expressed within are simply my opinion. I try to be as objective as possible but, let’s face it, that’s pretty difficult. Then again, if you’re going to take one man’s opinion as gospel on what are the best movies in any given year, then, quite honestly, you’re missing the entire point of this blog.

Happy reading!

Title~Wings - J.S. Zamecnik

On May 16th, 1929, the 1st Academy Awards took place in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel to hand out awards for the best films of 1927 and the first half of 1928. It had humble beginnings: tickets cost $5 (about $82 today), there was no live coverage and the whole ceremony took about 15 minutes. And, as you can tell from the title, there were actually two awards for what could now be called the Award for Best Picture.

First was the Academy Award for Outstanding Picture (for large, big-budget films; the modern equivalent would be if they had an Oscar reserved exclusively for summer blockbusters) which went to Wings. Second was the Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Picture (this is more in line with the traditional films that you typically see nominated for Academy Awards) which went to Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.

At the 2nd Academy Awards, they decided that having two winners for best picture was a dementedly stupid idea that would jeopardize life as we know it (though not in those words or as melodramatic) and retroactively decided that Wings was the better film. This makes Wings the first ever Academy Award winner. So, we’re going to be spending the bulk of this post talking about Wings but we’ll give a quick little review at the end on Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.

With that in mind, Wings is one of the OG war epics that celebrates American involvement in World War I (called the Great War at the time since this was before World War II). Two small town boys named Jack (Buddy Rogers) and David (Richard Arlen) decide to join the army after war is declared. At first, they hate each other but eventually become friends and both become decorated heroes in the newfound air force. Meanwhile, in a subplot, a woman from the same town named Mary (played by Clara Bow) is in love with Jack and joins the Motor Corps in the hopes of meeting him overseas.

From there, it turns into your pretty typical coming-of-age war movie that hits most of the plot points you can predict and most of the characters who die you can see coming from a mile away but, to be fair, it was 1927 when this movie came out; the clichés were still being written. Hell, this is one of the first big war epics so it probably invented most of those clichés.

First, the good stuff. Clara Bow as Mary is by far the show-stealer. The film was largely written around this character as Clara Bow was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood at the time and it’s not hard to see why. She has a very magnetic film presence, can make very funny facial expressions and is a great female character who gets in the thick of things to do her part for the war effort (remember this movie came out in 1927 so this is a very big deal that should be acknowledged).

The scale of the film is also incredible. What Wings is most widely remembered for is being the very first aviation film, having countless flying scenes that put the audience in the pilot’s seat and makes them feel like they’re flying over the ground. And they still hold up even today. Granted, it is a silent movie so if you watch it you do have to deal with intertitles popping in to explain who just died and who you’re supposed to be rooting for but that doesn’t take away from the effects. All of the battles (that’s battles, multiple, they go into the air quite a few times during the course of the film) really give you the impression of being hundreds of miles up in the air.

How did they achieve this effect back in the 1920s, you may ask? By strapping a camera to a plane and flying it hundreds of miles up into the air, of course! No, seriously, that’s how they used to shoot dogfight movies. William A. Wellman, the director of Wings, was a former flying ace who served in World War I himself so, to put this into perspective, this guy recreated one of the most stressful chapters of his life by putting a film camera that cost hundreds of dollars (even back then) onto a rickety little biplane that, if not secured properly, would send the camera, and the footage, plummeting down to God knows where. (For those of you who don’t work in film and can’t understand this fear, let me put it this way: whenever I see a camera near a glass of water, I start getting severe heart palpitations.)

The rest of the sets and effects still hold up too, especially for a film with so many locales. What set the 20s apart from the 30s in filmmaking (that we’ll be going into more in later installments) is how the scale and set design of films improved between the two decades. In the 20s, most movies were usually limited to one location that they milked for all it was worth and sometimes even those looked fake (for example, watch The Last Command (1928) and its crappy Russian palace set). You don’t get that with Wings.

The army base looks like a real army base, the battlefield looks like a real battlefield, the bombed-out houses look like real bombed-out houses. The aristocratic mansions, the Parisian bars, the hotels, the trenches, the set design in this movie is fucking on point. In addition, the dogfights aren’t the only aspect of filmmaking that Wings pushed to the limit. The climax of the film takes place on both the land and the air, there’s a POV shot on a swing set where the camera moves with the swing and there’s a masterful tracking shot partway through the movie that would be difficult to pull off even today.

Now, that’s not to say that everything in this movie has aged with grace. Though this is the problem that you run into when reviewing old movies: you have to try to critique it for when it came out at the time as well as how it holds up today, especially because American culture has changed incredibly in the past 100 years. And Wings is a special case in this regard as it’s actually pretty forward for its time. As mentioned, the female lead is actually a very likable character who never comes off as a damsel-in-distress. The movie is also one of the first films to show nudity, two men kissing (though not in a gay way) and even the Germans, who are the villains of the movie, are given a few moments to show that they’re not totally evil. So where does it age poorly?

Well, it should be no surprise that this movie is very aggressively pro-American. To sometimes hilarious degrees. I mean one of the chief side-characters’ whole schtick is that he has the American flag tattooed on his arm and shows it off every chance that he can get. And some of the actions of Jack, the main character who’s supposed to represent the small-town American boy who grew up from the war, come off as very immature and vile even though the film celebrates them. 

Here, let me try to explain. During the first big battle of the movie (seen above), the Americans go toe to toe with a German flying ace named Count von Kellermann (uncredited). At the end of the battle, Jack’s gun ends up jamming and von Kellermann chooses to spare him rather than go for the easy kill. The film has an intertitle congratulating the honor of the Germans for fighting fair and it adds a human moment to the war to show that not everything’s black and white.

Now, fast forward to the end of the movie during the climactic Battle of Saint-Mihiel where Jack is mowing down German troops who are in the process of retreating. This is where the movie loses me as I thought that was also considered fighting dirty. Aren’t you not supposed to shoot people with their backs turned? I thought that was even worse than shooting them when their guns jam. Did war honor change in the past 100 years? If so, how come I see old Westerns talk about how cowardly it is to shoot men in the back? The fact that it’s our main character doing this just makes it even worse.

Speaking of which, I’m also not a fan of Buddy Rogers’ Jack Powell. The actor’s doing a fine job, but the character comes off as a tool. I get it, he’s supposed to be immature but even by those standards, he can be really, really unlikable though, once again, I think this might just be an anachronism of 1927’s America.

The movie has basically two major narrative arcs. The first is how a small-town all-American boy becomes a decorated war hero. The second is the tragedy of war and how horrible it is when people die. So, during the end of the film when Jack returns home to a huge ass parade celebrating his accomplishments and then having to confront the parents of the man he killed, this creates a jarring whiplash that does not gel. Especially since he talks more about how much this affects him, rather than talking about the guy he killed.

So, that’s Wings. A huge spectacle when it first came out and a leap forward in filmmaking scale but the core story hasn’t quite aged well. Still, it’s not without its moments and for anyone who’s interested in old-school filmmaking from the silent era, this is definitely on the watch list. But was it truly the best movie of that year(s)? Well, before we find that out, let’s take a look at Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, which won the other best movie Oscar.

Ending~Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

Directed by F.W. Murnau (one of the pioneers of German Expressionism), Sunrise takes place in a small farm town where an unnamed man (George O’Brien) is married to an equally unnamed wife, (Janet Gaynor who became the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Actress because of this movie (well, this and 7th Heaven (1927)… and Street Angel (1928 (parantheses are fun)))). The man meets an unnamed woman from the city (Margaret Livingston), the two have an affair and the woman eventually convinces the man to murder his wife and elope with her.

The rest of the movie is then the man trying to hype himself up into actually doing the deed and living with the choice that he ends up making. Yeah, quite a bit darker than I was expecting for a movie with a title like Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans but it’s a good setup. It’s got a good beginning and a good ending; my problem comes with the middle even though the middle is actually where most other critics and cinephiles love it.

Sunrise is often lauded as one of the last great silent films as it creates a fairy tale-like world that contrasts the sinfulness of people who live in the city with the simplistic, wholesome living of the country folk. Yet it doesn’t shy away from the glitz and glamor of the city that makes it so alluring and that you can enjoy the funs of city life while still holding the quaint values of country life.

This is the kind of symbolism that film critics salivate over and love to talk about and analyze and wonder how it affects modern films. And the older the movie, the more they’ll salivate over it. So, allow me to take my first of many pot shots at trying to dispel the myths of Golden Age of Hollywood with the following sentence: the middle of this film is fucking boring. You can talk about themes and meanings and all that and that still won’t take away from the fact that we’re watching two people hang out in a city for a half-hour without any impending conflicts.

The characters are deliberately written as blank slates so it’s not even like you’ll be asking yourself, “What will happen when the Man goes to a barber shop and then a fair?” Well, he’ll probably do what anyone else who goes to a barber shop and then a fair does. The look of the film is also pretty average, for lack of a better word. It looks nice and is competent, but I associate F. W. Murnau with Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922), which has very revolutionary cinematography and creative use of shadows. Here, the cinematography, while good, is nothing groundbreaking.

Still, this is just a critique of the middle portion of the movie; the last act is once again quite engaging and, like I said, it’s genuinely suspenseful. In fact, comparing Sunrise with Wings, I actually do find myself preferring Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and think it has aged better, it just drags at parts. But could either be called the best movie of that year (year and five months, whatever)? Well, tune in next time and find out!