“This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war…”

Windows. I can’t get the windows out of my mind. Kind of an odd focus for this film, especially after All Quiet on the Western Front’s particularly somber Weekday Warm-up. But though I’ve seen this movie several times, I had never noticed before just how many images are viewed through windows and open doorways or how many scenes incorporate shots of windows. Honestly, the frequent recurrence of viewing the movie’s action through such portals could simply be a directing choice, a method of providing more visual depth to the film. On the flip side, does a film with extended scenes of battlefield combat—infantry charges through artillery barrages, lines and lines of troops mowed down by machine gun fire, hand-to-hand bayonet duels in the trenches—really need one more layer of action in the background? I’m not convinced it does. Why then all the windows?

In my most recent viewing of All Quiet on the Western Front, I was finally led to accept the fact that the windows are significant when, after numerous scenes of movement behind windows and open doors, the silhouette of a window is prominently featured on the wall of Paul’s bedroom when he briefly returns home toward the end of the movie. In this short but critical scene, Paul stands in the doorway of the room and gazes at what he feels is the remnants of his former life, a life he believes it is impossible to return to now that he is a soldier. His sister proudly presents the suit she’s kept ready for him, but Paul’s attention is arrested by his butterfly collection on the wall. Those who have seen this film know that Paul’s history of capturing butterflies is important for the film’s final scene, but what struck me more than the story’s revelation of Paul’s habits of collection is that Paul literally grew up with death hanging on his wall. He doled out death, collected it, and then proudly displayed it in his most personal space. Now, as a German soldier in World War I, Paul is again inundated with death. Indeed, the whole film presents the soldiers’ struggles to avoid death, come to terms with their own deaths, and comprehend the purpose of death in warfare. Near the end of the film Paul tells a group of young students: “Up at the front, you’re alive or you’re dead and that’s all. And you can’t fool anybody about that very long. And up there, we know we’re lost and done for, whether we’re dead or alive…And our bodies are earth. And our thoughts are clay. And we sleep and eat with death. And we’re done for, because you can’t live that way and keep anything inside you.” What Paul tells the young students mirrors the film’s opening statement about the war leaving no survivors. Paul and his friends go off to war with naïve expectations of glory, but all they find is death. Everywhere.

But how does this connect to the windows? Well, I had this epiphany in class this week, thanks to a comment made by a classmate of mine regarding how we are several steps removed, if you will, from older literary works due to translations and differences in historical eras. In that light, windows can also be levels of removal from fact. We can see through them (most of the time), but they create barriers to that reality we are glimpsing. I believe that the windows in All Quiet on the Western Front serve this purpose too. In the butterfly scene at Paul’s house, the window silhouette—and the glass of the frames that hold the butterfly collection—remind us that we are looking in on a reality that is not completely accessible to us. We are once removed (at least) from the actuality of what is on the other side of the glass.

In this same sense, throughout the film Paul and his fellow soldiers also display a separation between what they see/believe and what is actually reality. The propagandist teacher from the film’s opening scene lures his young pupils to enlist in the military by filling them with unrealistic dreams of battlefield glory and post-war fame. Notably, viewers of the film enter this classroom via its large windows, windows through which the students have been presented with immaculate troops parading in perfect lines through the quaint town. The poignant moments in which the young men see what they could become and envision what they believe is a glorious future are complicated by the barrier of the windows. The future seems to be in clear sight; but should the boys reach for it, they will literally be impeded by the window panes. The dream they see is not attainable. Reality on the other side of the windows is different from what the teacher persuades the boys to believe within the classroom.

Later as actual participants in the Great War, Paul and his friends move in and through the portals that populate the film—yet they always display obvious separation from the reality of the war and the very horrors they experience. One of the movie’s most thought-provoking scenes features the soldiers, all veterans now after having survived their first battle, discussing how the war started and why they are there. Interestingly, this scene takes place outside underneath some shade trees. There are no barriers to look through here; there is just the stark reality that no one understands (or wants) this war. The soldiers are clearly puzzled at the purpose of the war, at first blaming the French for starting it (demonstrating their belief in the untruthful propaganda they have been taught). They move on from the French to debate the causes of war in general and how it is even possible for one country to “offend” another–especially when the soldiers themselves admit they don’t feel offended in the least. At last, the soldiers decide war is like a “fever”: “Nobody wants it in particular. And then all at once, here it is. We didn’t want it. The English didn’t want it. And here we are fighting.”

Paul reiterates this idea of the unspoken camaraderie between soldiers who can’t explain the war and don’t want it. During a battle Paul must take cover in a shell hole with a dying French man whom he has stabbed. Paul vacillates between screaming at the man to die faster and comforting him with the idea that he will live because Paul is caring for him. When the man finally dies after hours of suffering, Paul begs the corpse for forgiveness, explaining, “When you jumped in here, you were my enemy–and I was afraid of you. But you’re just a man like me, and I killed you…Why did they do this to us? We only wanted to live, you and I. Why should they send us out to fight each other? If they threw away these rifles and these uniforms, you could be my brother.”

Both the war debate scene and the shell hole scene demonstrate again a disconnect between the soldiers and reality. They don’t have all the facts about the cause of the Great War, nor do they understand why they should slaughter unoffending men from a few hundred miles away as their mortal enemies. They look through the “windows” of their own reality, seeing not what they are told is truth but what they themselves experience as truth–and what they must make truth out to be in their minds in order to carry on with the bloodshed of which they are a part.

In the movie’s famous final scene (spoiler alert!), there is yet one more window-like feature (thanks to my sister for pointing this out to me!). Through a small square opening in an empty machine gun station, Paul, the only one of the boys still in combat at the end, glimpses a lovely butterfly that has landed on the mud and filth in front of the trench. Paul smiles. It is as if he is no longer conscious of the danger that he is constantly in. He reaches through the portal slowly, trying to catch the butterfly without scaring it. Alas, the portal prevents Paul from reaching far enough to snag the butterfly, so he, apparently without thinking, carefully begins to reach over the barrier to the butterfly. A French sniper takes aim. Just as Paul’s hand approaches the butterfly, the sniper fires. Paul’s hand jerks, then goes limp. We never see the butterfly’s fate.

While before the war, Paul killed butterflies and lined the walls of his room with their corpses, Paul wants this final butterfly alive. He literally wants to obtain and hold onto life. But what Paul sees as life in the butterfly is really death on the battlefield. The barrier Paul attempts to move through to snag the butterfly has lulled Paul into a false sense of security. It isn’t realistic for Paul to have life in All Quiet on the Western Front. What the film says is that, just as Paul’s death in attempting to catch a butterfly is ridiculous and meaningless, so also is all organized killing, i.e. warfare. It is neither glorious nor beautiful to die for one’s country. It is painful and grotesque. The movie, hopeless though it seems at times, seems to be yearning for a better solution to global conflict. Why must people die for political disagreements?

The film closes with an earlier shot of the young German soldiers, all of whom are either dead or wounded at the end of the movie, marching off to war. Each one gazes back straight into the camera, some accusingly, some pleadingly–all already lost as evidenced by the thousands of cross-marked graves over which the superimposed soldiers march. Notably, the end of the film is silent and leaves the audience in darkness for several moments before the credits appear. The Western Front has become quiet. The “good guys” have attained a hard-fought victory. But Paul and his friends were not the “good guys,” and we viewers have mourned their premature deaths.

For Me Then…

Because I am a movie nerd, I think of the scene in Moria in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf and Frodo discuss Gollum and Frodo expresses with disgust how he feels it is a “pity” that his uncle Bilbo didn’t kill Gollum when he had the chance. Gandalf replies, “Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death and judgment.” It oftentimes seems easy to consign people or people groups to certain “boxes”–and thus to consider whole communities and civilizations of people to be good or evil. For instance, some World War I stereotypes: The Serbians are ungovernable and must be oppressed; the Germans are barbarians who massacred unarmed Belgian civilians, etc. Yet, All Quiet on the Western Front and its German protagonist complicate this black-and-white thinking–just as Gandalf complicates Frodo’s simplistic thinking about who deserves life and who deserves death.

Back to those windows I can’t get out of my mind. For me, just as Paul and his friends struggled with seeing reality through the barriers that were placed before them, we too, separated as we are by time and culture from WWI and its participants, see the events of the Great War through the windows of our own time and backgrounds. It would be easy to condemn specific countries or groups of people, yet we cannot truly know them or their motives. Furthermore, as Gandalf points out to Frodo, even if we knew for sure who was good and who was evil, is it in our power to convey life or death on others? Are we morally upright enough to assume that power?

I greatly value All Quiet on the Western Front’s place in the study of the First World War—especially because its German anti-war perspective is rare and because the work transcends its characters and its times to bring its readers/viewers into a head-on collision with life and death. But more than the film’s commentary on the Great War, its lasting legacy could be in its asking us to reevaluate our positions relative to others. It is easy to condemn and retaliate. It is much harder to love, forgive, and seek to understand.

To be honest, I’m pretty excited about this week’s movie, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Universal). Having studied and taught both the original novel and its film counterpart, this work means a little more to me personally—and it seems much more profound and timeless to me than many of its contemporaries. Plus, what a sweet title, yes?

Erich Maria Remarque, himself a veteran German infantryman of the First World War, originally published All Quiet on the Western Front as a serial in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitunghe in 1928, the publication of the work in novel form following in 1929. The novel was immensely successful both in Germany and internationally, and production of the film based on the novel commenced soon after the novel’s release. The film would go on to win two Oscars: Outstanding Production and Best Directing.

However, the Nazis, who rose to power in Germany in the early 1930s, saw the novel and its film as a threat both to their belief system and to German morale. All Quiet on the Western Front is overwhelmingly anti-war in its presentation of German youths who are persuaded with nationalistic propaganda from their teacher to join the fight against the Allied forces led by France and Britain. What the young soldiers discover when they arrive at the Western Front is put bluntly by Paul, the story’s protagonist, in the film: “It’s dirty and painful to die for your country. When it comes to dying for your country, it’s better not to die at all. There are millions out there dying for their country, and what good is it?”

To the Nazis, this type of thinking was tantamount to blasphemy. In their minds, Germany’s defeat in World War I was unacceptable—if not false. The real blame for the end of the war and for the foul treatment Germany received from the rest of the world at the Paris Peace Conference that followed it could be placed on a group of Jews who signed the Treaty of Versailles to end the war. This “stab-in-the-back theory” is untrue; yet within a country desperately trying to cope with the devastation it experienced in the Great War, it became quite popular to promote and believe in such a scapegoat idea because the reality of Germany’s situation in the war and after it was difficult both to understand and to accept.

Most history books teach that the Sarajevo assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the “spark” that started WWI, but the real causes of the war run deep and complicated through the various alliances and military strategies that existed among the nations of Europe and Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That being said, Germany neither started WWI nor committed the war’s only atrocities, although they would be accused of both. All the countries at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 agreed that Germany was “guilty” of causing WWI and must be required to make reparations for war damages. To that effect, the Treaty of Versailles included an article known as the War Guilt Clause, which imposed a legal liability on Germany and her allies for all the losses and damages of the war. Just as a war on the scale of WWI had never been seen before, this idea of legally burdening a defeated country with moral responsibility for a military event was also new. Germans were the bad guys. As such, they would pay financially, militarily, and psychologically.

The victorious countries of the First World War bickered over just how much money to demand Germany repay, and in May 1921 it was decided that Germany would pay all the reparations for the war at a staggering cost of $34 billion. Though the League of Nations renegotiated this amount down to a little over $26 billion in 1924, from 1920-1932, Germany only managed to scrape together $4.5 billion in repayment. In 1931, the year after the film All Quiet on the Western Front was released, Germany was granted a moratorium on its annual payments; and in 1932, all reparations were abandoned.

How Germany managed to pay even the $4.5 billion it did is incredible considering the immense poverty and population decline it experienced after the Great War. With the rise of more efficient weapons such as the machine gun, the casualties inflicted during WWI are hard to comprehend: approximately 1,700,000 killed and 4,200,000 wounded for Germany alone (overall casualty numbers for the entire war are believed to exceed 35,000,000).

We won’t usually be dealing with a ton of numbers on FlicksChick.com, but I feel that for this film in particular it is important to note the historical magnitude of the times and the war—as well as the film’s place relative to them. For the Nazis, then, many of them (including Hitler) WWI veterans themselves, there had to be more to the war than just dying and losing. Their anger and frustration were legitimate and understandable, but their subsequent beliefs and horrendous actions were appalling and inexcusable. All Quiet on the Western Front, despite its veteran German author, was caught up in this post-WWI rage and condemned in Germany. Nazis staged riots outside of theaters that dared to show the film, and Remarque’s novel was included in the bonfires of books that the Nazis declared anti-German. It became a criminal offense to own All Quiet on the Western Front.

Remarque himself, anticipating danger, fled first to Switzerland and then to the United States in the late 1930s. While he lived a swinging kind of life in America, his family in Germany suffered greatly under the Nazi regime, most notably his sister Elfriede, who was guillotined by the Nazis in 1943 for “defeatist talk.” It is rumored that the judge at her sham trial declared to her, “We have sentenced you to death because we cannot apprehend your brother. You must suffer for your brother.” Remarque was devastated when he learned of Elfriede’s death.

So this week, we of the twenty-first century have the privilege of looking into the film that came from Remarque’s novel. I feel that this is both a privilege and a responsibility. While many movies in the Best Picture list can be called feel-good films or cult classics, this one is quite different. It is a story with a message that evil and misguided men tried to deny and erase. And regardless of how we feel about what the movie says, we cannot ignore that within our own times violence and killing are allowed to run rampant in many parts of the world and, just like the character of Paul, we can neither understand it nor condone it. What do we do with all the killing then?

This is a super somber way to end this Weekday Warm-up, I know, but I think that it’s appropriate for this week’s film. For those interested in further reading about All Quiet on the Western Front and its treatment in Germany, check out the Smithsonian’s article “The Most Loved and Hated Novel About World War I.” For more detailed thoughts on All Quiet on the Western Front and its significance, check out the full post this weekend, and thank you for sticking with this film’s Weekday Warm-up!

At first glance, The Broadway Melody seems to change gears completely from the war-time tragedy of Wings. This second Best Picture winner presents a story of two sisters, Hank and Queenie, pursuing glitz and glamour in a vibrant young Broadway culture. Apparently set at the same time as its filming, the late 1920s, The Broadway Melody stands at the pinnacle of one of Broadway’s most successful decades and looks down into the chasm of the unavoidable Great Depression of the 1930s, a time period that would see the closures of many Broadway theaters and the exodus of major Broadway talent, such as the Marx Brothers and Irving Berlin, to the up-and-coming Hollywood scene.

What we could focus on in this post is how Hank and Queenie, in one sense, represent the archetypal show-biz dream of how hard work combined with some fortunate connections and rare opportunities can lead to commercial success and the fulfillment of one’s dreams. Another critique of the film could emphasize its treatment of women, their exploitation and objectification at the hands of the men who make money off female exhibitionism in a type of twisted voyeurism. Notable instances in the movie of the value of women as money-making objects occur when a female dancer (in very, very short shorts) is dismissed because her “headache” is hindering her performance, as well as when another actress falls off a lofty column and is carried from the stage unconscious to be simply replaced by Queenie—with no concern that she will follow the doom of her predecessor. Furthermore, the predatory nature of the rich and powerful Jacques Warriner introduces yet a further threat to women’s independence, along with their dignity and self-respect.

Yet over and above the historical and feminist critiques that we could use in evaluating the meaning and significance of The Broadway Melody, in my opinion, the real worth of the film is found in the relationship between the two sisters. Obviously close, from the beginning Hank and Queenie seem more than siblings. Already business partners from their successful Mahoney Sisters act from somewhere out West, they chat like college roommates in their new lodgings in New York; but there is an undeniable mother/daughter-like dynamic between them as well. Hank repeatedly boasts first to Uncle Jed, their manager, and then to Eddie, her boyfriend, how much Queenie has grown and developed in recent years to become the most beautiful creature Hank can imagine. This mothering pride is not unaccompanied by constant concern for Queenie’s well-being, as well as the burden of responsibility for the sister act’s continued success (as well as the sisters’ financial stability) in the more competitive Broadway environment. For Queenie’s sake, Hank is determined that the Mahoney Sisters will be a Broadway smash.

The main struggle the movie presents, though, is not whether or not the Mahoney Sisters will become famous in New York. Instead, the conflict begins when Eddie, a song-writer/performer whose long-term relationship with Hank is supposedly headed to the altar (if Hank finally consents to become a wife), first lays eyes on the now-grown Queenie. Queenie is taller, blonder, and more demure than her sister; and Eddie is clearly love-struck in an instant. Hank, preoccupied with her drive to make her sister a success, initially fails to notice the connection between Eddie and Queenie, but Queenie feels something for Eddie as well, and later in the film both express their love for each other. Shockingly, rather than confess this love to Hank, Queenie’s solution to this sibling love triangle dilemma is to welcome the advances of Jacques Warriner, an influential Broadway tycoon whose aim is to make Queenie his mistress. Although Queenie initially displays distrust and dislike for Mr. Warriner, she permits him to woo her with flowers and jewelry and get her drunk at an elaborate birthday bash in her honor. It is only when Mr. Warriner buys Queenie an apartment and refuses to let her rejoin her house-warming party guests that Queenie must finally resist his blatant sexual advances (conspicuously and menacingly, the apartment’s large bed looms in the background of this struggle).

During Queenie’s fling with Warriner, Hank constantly urges her to reconsider her actions, always concerned with Queenie’s safety and virtue. To Hank, fame is not worth losing one’s values, nor is it necessary to compromise oneself in order to experience success in show business. Though Hank misinterprets Queenie’s actions as selfish and unreasonable, she never ceases to love her sister or to encourage her to do what is right. Like a typical mother, Hank believes that she both knows what is best for Queenie and can provide everything that Queenie wants and desires. But this is not true. What Queenie really desires is Eddie—a desire she refuses to act upon for love of her sister. In fact, both sisters’ longings deprive the other of her dreams; but for the sake of their love for each other, Hank and Queenie deny what they really want—in effect, still preventing themselves from truly finding their places in their new life.

When at last Hank realizes that her sister and her boyfriend are in love with each other, Hank, true to her character, takes action. Like Queenie’s exploits with Warriner, Hank’s actions are both dishonest and misleading—but stem from love. She loudly and viciously confronts Eddie in the sisters’ backstage dressing room, screaming at him that he is a coward because he loves Queenie and yet doesn’t dare to protect her from Warriner’s designs. Prior to this point in the film, this accusation could be true. Is Eddie afraid of Warriner, a morally deficient man who most certainly can influence the success or failure of Eddie’s career? Or, is Eddie’s fear of Hank and her reaction to his transference of his love to Queenie greater than his professed love for Queenie?

When Hank also vehemently declares that she doesn’t really love Eddie, the viewer knows for certain that everything Hank has said in this scene can be doubted. Her tears upon Eddie’s hasty exit and her holding the photos of Eddie and Queenie as she sobs reinforce the fact that her words and actions are self-sacrificing, as we know Queenie’s are as well. Hank does love Eddie—and Queenie. Queenie loves Eddie—and Hank. And, as the following scene shows, Eddie is brave enough to save Queenie from Warriner, though he gets pretty roughed up in the process.

In the end (spoiler alert!), everyone loves everyone; and apparently everyone finds his/her purpose. The viewer is led to believe that Eddie and Queenie’s marriage will be a success (although it is doubtful if Queenie will have her own career now that she is a wife) and that Hank is happy playing mother to her new show biz partner with whom she embarks on another performance stint out west.

For Me Then…

The paramount idea here is self-sacrifice, loving someone enough to deny oneself one’s own dreams and desires. In this way, The Broadway Melody shares something with Wings in which the character of David frequently denies his own feelings and wants to promote those of his friend Jack. While one couple in both movies finally finds romantic love, self-denying love is seen as more important, especially in the relationship of the sisters in The Broadway Melody. Perhaps Eddie and Queenie will be happy together, but I doubt whether their relationship will contain as much depth as the connection between Queenie and her sister shown at the movie’s beginning. It is also possible that Hank will find peace and success in the West with her new blond partner, but this novice companion is not the sister that Hank has raised and of whom she is so proud. Did Hank intend to raise her sister to marry her own boyfriend? Nope. She brought up Queenie for a partnership of equals, sisters whose act was not an act if one was missing. In this light, again, the viewer’s feelings at the close of the film are similar to those evoked by the end of Wings: unease and discontent. There is romantic love at the end of The Broadway Melody, but the impending separation of the Mahoney sisters (as siblings, not as an act) reemphasizes just how much more powerful is a love of selflessness.

Just as Wings was the first war movie to win the Academy’s highest honor, this week’s featured film, The Broadway Melody (1929, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), was the first musical to take home the coveted prize. Also like Wings, The Broadway Melody won Outstanding Picture (not Best Picture)—and that was the sole award won by the film, which is quite a rare feat in Academy Awards history.

While, yes, The Broadway Melody is technically a musical, it is not a musical in the sense of classic films such as The Sound of Music or My Fair Lady in which the songs most often continue the themes and purposes of the characters’ dialogues—nor can it in any way compare to other such Broadway smashes-turned-into-movie-successes like The Phantom of the Opera or Les Misérables in which most of the dialogue is in fact sung rather than spoken.

In some ways, then, The Broadway Melody shares a few similarities with the recent hit musical film La La Land in that singing numbers are frequently set up by audition experiences or performance-based situations. Funny how trends from the past eventually come back around!

For more detailed thoughts on The Broadway Melody and its significance, check out the full post this weekend!

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.

Check out this picture from the very first Academy Awards ceremony!

Here in the middle of the week—and especially at this very early time in FlicksChick.com’s life—I thought it would be helpful to share some fun facts about the first movie we will discuss, Wings (1927, Paramount Famous Lasky).

The first few movies to win the Academy Award for Best Picture are relatively obscure (except, perhaps, for All Quiet on the Western Front, which was remade in the late 1970s and often finds itself part of a high school or college curriculum). Wings, most commonly accepted as the first BP winner, didn’t even technically win a “Best Picture” Oscar. Instead, it took home an award for Outstanding Picture, Production, while a film entitled Sunrise captured the then-equivalent award for Best Unique and Artistic Production, the only movie to ever receive this title since the Academy decided to drop the award after the first year. The other Academy Award given to Wings was for Engineering Effects, another now-defunct category.

The first Academy Awards show was held in Los Angeles on May 16, 1929, to honor the films and filmmakers of 1927-28. The ceremony was even more exclusive than it is now, and no such La La Land-or-Moonlight confusion would have been possible since the winners had all been announced before the event, which was broadcast neither on the popular radio nor on the newly invented television (which the vast majority of people did not yet have in their homes anyway).

What first strikes viewers of Wings is that it is a silent film, a movie experience very foreign to us today. In fact, the first full-length motion picture to incorporate synchronized dialogue (and, hence, earn the nickname “talkie”) was a contemporary of Wings, The Jazz Singer (1927). Though most available copies of Wings have been remastered with sound effects and music, original viewers would have taken in an absolutely soundless piece of art, which was accompanied by a specifically customized live organ score and sound effects created in-house. What a totally bizarre concept that noise had to be created in a theater setting!

Another notable aspect of Wings is its aerial footage. Considering that Orville and Wilbur Wright had flown their airplane not even 30 years previously (1903), what Wings does in the air is stunning. Admittedly, the film’s plane material does distract the viewer a bit from the movie’s storyline, but it’s worth it as it is a treat to see some of the earliest military planes clash in fiery duels in the clouds.

For more detailed thoughts on Wings and its significance, check out the full post this weekend!

After years of contemplating this whole speaking-out-to-the world thing, it was this year’s Oscars that finally pushed me from ruminating about starting a movie blog to actually doing it. It wasn’t just the fact that Moonlight won Best Picture, but the very act of literally uncrowning La La Land and replacing it with Moonlight—on stage in front of a live audience both present and on television—that really bothered me. I kept replaying that moment in my mind, disbelieving 1) that such an egregious mistake could be made on live TV (sorry, Steve Harvey); 2) that just such an error happened only during the show’s (and the year’s) biggest honor; and 3) that what I saw as a reaction of fear to the #OscarsSoWhite campaign tipped the scales for what film would win, thereby bringing into question the legitimacy of what is arguably the preeminent awards show and a greatly significant moment for our culture. Without getting too far into all the politics of this year’s Academy Awards (at least for right now), suffice it to say that after years of thinking and planning and discussing and plotting, a victorious Moonlight has led to this blog making a longstanding dream my new reality.

I have a theory about movies.

Almost twenty years ago, when I was just starting high school, I was sitting in a doctor’s office flipping through a magazine—Time, I believe—trying to keep down the nerves that always tried to choke me when I was at the doctor’s. In a tiny box at the bottom of a page near the end of the issue, I skimmed over a small picture of a gigantic ship, all lit up, half sunk in a dark body of water. Something jolted the obsessive historian in me; and after studying the picture a few moments more, I read the short paragraph that accompanied it. It told of the upcoming release of a film by James Cameron (didn’t ring a bell) about the sinking of the infamous Titanic (that did ring a bell). The movie would very creatively be called Titanic and would be released in December 1997.

From that moment on, I had to see Titanic in all its tragic glory. Stealthily (or so I thought), I tore out the tiny article, pocketed it, and survived the doctor’s appointment with a little more pep than usual. Months and months later, Titanic was released to unprecedented box office success and non-stop social chatter. Since I was pre-driving age and couldn’t persuade my parents to take me to my favorite movie that I had never seen, the days and weeks crept by during which Titanic’s success soared and I devoured every TV special, news story, periodical article, book, etc. that I could find on either the historical event or its Hollywood counterpart.

And the music. If I was in love with the movie without actually seeing it, I was more obsessed with James Horner’s score. Even before the soundtrack was all over the radio, Celine Dion’s video for “My Heart Will Go On” was a frequent feature on VH1, which my parents failed to notice was my go-to channel. How sad and glorious it all was! And even more splendid was the moment when I opened a brand-new Titanic soundtrack on cassette tape that Christmas! From then on, every night I refused to sleep until I had listened to the entire album at least once on my Walkman.

Then came the Academy Awards in March 1998. That show would prove to be the fateful moment, the de facto start of this blog that many years ago. It was the 70^th Academy Awards, and what would a good awards show be without a montage or two? (I LOVE montages!) I devoured all the clips and hype about Titanic—and even the jokes at its expense—but the few minutes that resonated the most with me were introduced by Dustin Hoffman and were set to the music of DragonHeart (of course)—a montage of all the movies to have won Best Picture up to that point in time. Some films I had seen already (Ben-Hur, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady), some I had seen in part (Schindler’s List, Braveheart), some I had heard of (The Godfather, The Silence of the Lambs), and others I was completely ignorant about (The Broadway Melody? Marty?). I was fascinated…obsessed, is probably an applicable moniker as well. If Titanic, the 70^th winner, was spectacular, what riches did the rest of the BPs hold?

Little did I know that the tiny scrap of an article on the making of Titanic that I had found would lead to my first Academy Awards broadcast and then to a quest to watch all the Best Picture winners before I died. Since then, I’ve seen many of them. But, in the last few years, I’ve modified the watch-before-death plan to view the BP winners in order, connect them to their times, and evaluate their meanings and messages, as well as their effects on culture and on myself. For, as I mentioned earlier, I have a theory about movies.

Our media-saturated culture glories in its technology, in making non-reality seem like reality, in leading us to lose ourselves in activities and entertainments that allow us to escape from the mundane, and often painful, day-to-day of life. However, just as authors never write anything without a purpose and no book fails to project a message to its readers, movies are not benign escapism. Rather, they are one of the leading influences on our culture today. So, it’s a pretty ludicrous idea that we consume them with no effect on ourselves!

Likewise, film does not exist in a vacuum. The issues and events of its times shape a movie’s content as well as its theme. For instance, does Casablanca foresee an end to World War II? How does In the Heat of the Night’s Mr. Tibbs fit into the larger Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s? Is Gladiator a commentary on its culture’s preoccupation with violence? These questions are emblematic of the issues that movies ask us to address. Furthermore, how one approaches and answers these questions reveals much about both oneself and one’s culture. In essence, then, the study of film is really the study of ourselves.

And where better to begin such a study than with the films that hold the title of Best Picture Winner, the movies that have been honored as the superior achievements in film-making for their respective years? Following the Best Picture winners, the plan for this blog is to move on to their fellow nominees, movies that were tapped for the industry’s highest honor but did not receive the Academy’s vote. Each week a new film will be discussed, and my hope is that we can graciously delve into these classics of film as we would into the classics of literature—examining the art and its context to discover its messages, meanings, and significance. Perhaps we can also find ourselves along the way. Will you join me?

Oh, and by the way, in case anyone was wondering about the conclusion of my Titanic story, I’m fairly certain I was the last person on earth to actually see Titanic in the theater. But it was everything I had hoped it would be, and seeing one of the highest grossing films of all time in the theater was truly a moment of triumph for me.