Wings

Wings is the first "Best Picture, Production" Oscar winner of the Academy Awards in 1929. The film's plot revolves around two men who have both fallen in love with the same person. Wow, well its actually more complex than that so let me try this out:

Jack Powell is in love with Sylvia Lewis. Jack's friend David Armstrong is also in love with Sylvia. Jack's next door neighbor Mary Preston is in love with Jack but Jack doesn't notice it because he loves Sylvia too much. The unfortunate thing is that Sylvia does not love Jack, but loves David instead. Okay, got that? Good.

The United States soon joins World War I, and both Jack and David join the Air Force. To try and stay close to Jack, Mary joins the Women's Motor Corp. Many trials and tribulations follow the characters, as they work their way through the Great War.

To be perfectly honest, the film was brilliant. The cast was stellar and the set and location shooting was suprub. At the advent of sound, it would take almost a decade before films were this wonderfully made again. Remember - without sound, crews could do so much more - once sound films came about, there wasn't much flexibility with the audio equipment, keeping them from doing much more than big screen plays - or films shot wonderfully but with marginal sound.

Anyway, the battles themselves look just as good as what you'd find in Kubrick's "Paths of Glory", which came out 30 years later.

Yep, it's that good.

****/*****