Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
Wings
Two young men from the same town, in love with the same girl, learn to fly together and go up against the German air service over France in 1918.
Paramount handed William Wellman, who had flown in France himself, a fortune and the War Department’s aeroplanes, and he spent them on the sky. Charles Rogers and Richard Arlen are the rivals who become a pair; Clara Bow is the girl next door who drives an ambulance to the front to keep an eye on one of them. The cameras were bolted to the planes, so the clouds are real and so is the ground coming up. Gary Cooper has one scene and leaves a half-eaten bar of chocolate behind. Watch the Paris café: the camera glides over the tables, between the couples, until it finds Jack drunk. It won the first award for best picture.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- William A. Wellman · Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast
- Photographed by
- Harry Perry
- With
- Gary Cooper · George Irving · Clara Bow · Hedda Hopper · William A. Wellman · Arlette Marchal
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
The war from the mud and the war from the clouds, two years apart, both written by men who had been in it: Stallings walked into Belleau Wood, Saunders taught flying. Each sends a boy from a quiet American town to France, and each saves its battle for after the love story has had its hour.
Clara Bow two years apart, on the way up. In The Plastic Age she is the girl the college warns its sons about; in Wings she is the girl next door who follows one of them to France. Both films put a young American man between a race he means to win and a girl he did not plan on.