Wings, the first war movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, takes its place in history at a critical and fascinating time—sandwiched almost exactly in between both World Wars. WWI—the Great War, the “war to end all wars”—had come to a close in 1918; Adolf Hitler would become chancellor of Germany in 1933, just six years after the making of Wings; and the invasion of Poland would begin WWII in 1939. For those living in the late 1920s, WWI was the worst event their world had ever experienced; and it was most likely only a very, very few people who could have perceived (much less admitted) that certain wheels had already been set in motion for the even greater catastrophe of the Holocaust in the not-too-distant future. Yet for the characters of Wings, Americans finally joining the brutality of the First World War, their historical setting offers them both adventure and horror, propelling them into adulthood while leaving them still trying to cling to the innocence of childhood.

The movie’s opening scene between Jack Powell and his neighbor girl Mary Preston reinforces this carelessness of childhood as Jack and Mary work on his car, Jack naming it “The Shooting Star” and Mary flirtatiously informing him that when a boy sees a shooting star, he can kiss his girl. Jack’s prized automobile is not so very different from the primitive planes he will soon be flying—all the car needs is a pair of “wings,” and the ground version of The Shooting Star will nearly match the aerial version Jack operates later. But what a morbid name for an airplane! Certainly, it is no stretch to compare a falling star with a flaming plane plummeting to earth. Additionally, if shooting stars can be associated with death, what do we do with Mary’s insistence that viewing them should inspire romance? The juvenility of the scene cannot be overstated. What is death to Jack and Mary at this point in their lives? The carnage is overseas, not at home. Yet Jack takes his naiveté with him to Europe, refusing to relinquish his youth to the war, naming his war plane The Shooting Star and leaving his first Shooting Star in Mary’s care.

A character with a less enthusiastic approach to the war is David Armstrong. In a painfully drawn-out scene, David takes leave of his parents and his dog, at one point accidentally spilling what appears to be his mother’s sewing box and discovering a tiny, old teddy bear he possessed as a child. His mother has cherished the bear because David loved it, and David decides to take the bear to war with him as his good luck charm. Again, though forced to face the monster of his times, a character refuses to relinquish his childhood and instead clings to it, compelling his youth to attempt to deal with the horrors of the real world.

Clara Bow as Mary Preston in Wings

While neither Jack nor David’s characters really emphasize a patriotic image of a man going off to fight for right and for his country, Mary’s war-time actions, on the other hand, do show us something about women and how both the film and its culture perceive them. After the departure of the young men, Mary comes across a newspaper advertisement asking for female ambulance drivers. Mary is overjoyed, and viewers are to assume she wastes no time in signing up. While Mary’s motivations for enlisting are unclear (to support the war effort? to advance the rights of women? to be closer to Jack, the boy she loves?), what becomes clear very quickly in the film is that Mary is not taken seriously as a member of the military force. Overseas, Mary is her usual ever-peppy self, bouncing along in her medical rig, waving to lonesome soldiers as they march past. Her emotions—in a way, very similar to Jack’s—are inconsistent with the violence of the war-torn world in which she has placed herself. She is seemingly first oblivious of and then obliging toward the soldiers’ flirtations. But these same soldiers are literally on the march toward their next combat destination and will certainly not all survive to the next skirmish. Likewise, when Mary is unexpectedly caught in the German shelling of a French town, she seems more insulted than afraid or inspired to help those who are wounded. To me personally, although Clara Bow, the actress who played Mary Preston, was the “it-girl” of the 1920s and a large factor in what drew original viewers of Wings, the film’s treatment of her character presents a devastatingly negative view of women as it reduces them to objects at the disposal or pleasure of men.

This adverse portrayal of women is even more obvious in the odd (and extremely lengthy) Paris social scene in which Jack drinks himself into a bizarre fascination with champagne bubbles. Interesting side note: this scene presents a strong argument for Prohibition (the constitutional ban on the production, distribution, and sale of alcohol in the United States from 1920-1933), a movement motivated in large part by women’s protests against spousal abuse and men’s mismanagement of household funds. Ironically, it is Jack’s love of drink that leads to Mary’s stereotyping and disgrace. Jack’s senseless intoxication leaves him vulnerable to the wiles of a French woman whose only care for him is that he is a famous American war pilot. Mary, whose duties as ambulance driver have also brought her to Paris, first uselessly tries to get Jack to recognize her and after getting a pep talk from a French woman sitting in the ladies’ bathroom (weird, I know), decides to take action and win Jack away from the French woman. To do so, though, Mary must change her identity (with the help of the French bathroom woman), replacing her uniform (in which Jack fails to recognize her) with a flashy flapper dress, nylons, and heels. Mary succeeds in getting Jack to choose her over the French girl but only because Jack mistakes the sparkle of Mary’s dress for the champagne bubbles he loves. Mary is thus reduced to an object that can give Jack the strange thing he currently desires.

Out of concern for her friend’s well-being, Mary takes Jack to a bedroom in the hotel and puts him to bed to rest, after which she begins to change back into her uniform. Shockingly, in mid-change (and, yes, there is actually brief nudity here), some military officers come into the room looking for airmen who have been called back to duty for what is being called the final push against the Germans. The intruders clearly like what they see and enjoy heckling Mary about her awkward situation and her lack of propriety. In fact, they say, there’s no place in the army for a woman of such low character, so Mary is discharged on the spot and sent home. Rather than protest her mistreatment and explain the misread situation, Mary submits to the men and does not appear in the movie again until its final scene. Just as her pain at the war’s brutality is not shown, viewers are also not permitted to see how she must have struggled emotionally or mentally at the experience of being labeled a “loose woman” and the disgrace of arriving home for such a reason. The fact that the men who discharge Mary automatically assume that she is sexually promiscuous (an idea also held by Jack’s comrades who show him the newspaper article about Mary’s forced return home), combined with the fact that the newspaper makes her shame public, shed light on a struggle that women have faced for ages—the idea that women are to blame for the weaknesses and moral failures of men. Though Jack defends Mary’s honor, refusing to believe that she could have sexually compromised herself, we know Jack to be still childlike—he flies his Shooting Star and laughs at the most serious moments—for instance, he is quite jolly when he ends up in the British trenches after a crash. No grown, mature man defends Mary. She is a lost woman, and it is no surprise to any of the male characters (except immature Jack) that she has become such. I find this troubling, to say the least.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the undressing/ogling scene, though, is the movie’s climax (spoiler alert!). David has foreseen his own death and leaves his teddy bear with Jack to return it to his mother as promised. Jack refuses to believe David’s doom-and-gloom prophecy; and after the young men fight (for, yes, they both believe they are in love with the same woman, the wealthy and beautiful Sylvia Lewis), the bear is left behind in their tent. David is, of course, shot down, but he survives behind enemy lines. Enraged at his friend’s supposed death, Jack decides to take vengeance on the entire German air force and goes on a rogue mission across enemy lines to shoot down as many German planes as possible. What the audience knows and what Jack does not know until it is too late is that David has daringly stolen a German plane and is attempting to fly back to the American base when Jack encounters him. Needing to shoot down one more plane in his friend’s honor, Jack mercilessly pursues the German plane David is piloting.

The scene is utterly agonizing as it cuts from Jack’s determined cruelty to David’s heartbreaking and inaudible pleas to his friend to spare him. Just as he spared Jack the truth about Sylvia’s choice of lover (David), David again demonstrates love for his friend in not engaging him in battle. Instead, Jack shoots down David’s plane without a fight and lands near David’s crash site as the conqueror to take the spoils of the German emblem on David’s plane. The villagers, though, have pulled David from the wreckage and made him comfortable in his last moments. A woman in mourning black, who is not to be separated from her small child, petitions Jack to come into the room where David is dying. The reason for this is a little murky. If the location of this scene is behind German lines, then this woman and her child are apparently the family of a dead German soldier, which opens the door for the viewer to feel sympathy for the enemy, an enemy who has been presented as sub-human until this point and is now presented as co-human with the movie’s main characters. Another possible reading of the scene is that this is the future family that David will now never have. Jack recognizes David right away, and David’s maturity and strength of character again dwarf Jack’s as David explains that his death is not Jack’s fault because Jack could only see that the plane was German. Jack does not see past the label to the humanity. His immaturity and self-absorption are supreme. War is more of a game than a tragedy to him. The two friends embrace and even kiss(-ish), but David dies.

Upon his return home, Jack is given a grand parade through town—and seems to enjoy it—but notable residents are absent: David’s parents, Sylvia, and Mary. After he is celebrated, Jack visits David’s parents to return David’s bear. Now Jack seems vulnerable and nearly inconsolable. It is possible to think that the actuality of David’s grieving parents (and being the cause of that grief) has finally changed Jack into a mature adult who will face the broken realities of his times. But the movie isn’t done with Jack yet. Like David himself, David’s parents are light-years beyond Jack in their comprehension of what the Great War has done and what it means. They forgive Jack for killing David, perhaps because they realize that the war has, in truth, left no survivors (an idea to be emphasized more clearly a few years later in All Quiet on the Western Front). Though Jack himself may not know this, the haunting final scene of the movie reinforces this idea, although it may not intend to.

Charles “Buddy” Rogers as Jack Powell in Wings

The last we see of Jack, he is again on land, once more with the automobile version of The Shooting Star. Mary peeps over the fence again, but this time Jack is ecstatic to see her. He tells her that he had a close call with a woman in France whose identity he never wants to know and whom he never wants to talk about again. It seems obvious that this unnamed woman is Mary, not the French woman who was the real threat to Jack’s morality. This declaration silences Mary and forces her to forever deal with her pain and disgrace internally. This repression of the woman is apparently acceptable to the characters of both Jack and Mary; for, nevertheless, the couple sits contentedly together on the narrow seat of The Shooting Star, at least outwardly unmindful of the connection again with falling planes or David’s death. When they see a real shooting star, Jack giddily asks Mary what one is supposed to do when one sees such a stellar phenomenon; and then, of course, the movie closes with the final kiss.

What could then be (and is probably intended to be) seen as a movie about love ends in a way that leaves its viewer more than a little uncomfortable. There is not enough time between David’s death and the final kiss to reconcile the viewer’s emotions or to persuade the movie’s audience that the war has not “killed” Jack too in a way that leads him to permanently revert to his childlike state. It can be assumed that his unreality will be perpetual; perhaps denying his war experiences, his guilt, and his trauma is the only way that he can go on living. But, as All Quiet on the Western Front would insist, is that living?

For Me Then…

Wings is tragic. Maybe I should read Mary as a progressive image for women—she does wear pants/a uniform and goes off to war like the men—but she is still mistakenly sexualized, and even the fact that Clara Bow is the only actor in the film required to yield to brief nudity definitely draws the viewer’s attention to the movie’s commodification of women. Who knows what great feats Mary would have been capable of performing during the war? How many lives could she have saved, hurts could she have assuaged, had she been allowed to continue her work? Instead, she is relegated again to her house—more specifically, to her yard. We never even see her inside a home of her own. She neither fits into the domestic realm of women nor the battlefield of men.

Despite what it implies about women, the focus of the film is really the war—specifically the two young friends who are caught up in it without understanding its significance or the part they play in it—and without comprehending that, while they cling to their innocence, the war is destroying them. In theory, the demands of war should make men out of boys, but Wings says that in fact it is the opposite: war makes men into boys. And then it slaughters them, some physically, all metaphorically.