Rent Wings (1927)

Boys in the Sky, More Than Just Fly - Wings review by griggs

The film’s reputation often rests on being the first Best Picture winner, but that undersells its real strengths. What keeps Wings airborne are the flying sequences: aerial stunts and combat scenes choreographed with precision and filmed with a clarity still striking today.

Around that spectacle, the film mixes melodrama, romance, and broad comedy. At its core are Richard Arlen and Charles Rogers as small-town youths turned celebrated airmen in France. Their relationship, played with tenderness and intensity, carries a homoerotic charge that makes it more than just another war buddy tale.

Clara Bow, Paramount’s biggest star, provides the sparkle—spirited, earthy, first glimpsed brushing aside a pair of knickers before reappearing in Paris as an ambulance driver, even in a brief nude scene. Yet for all her charisma, the true centre remains the bond between Arlen and Rogers. The melodrama shows its age, but the flying and the friendships still hold the film steady.

Best air combat sequences - Wings review by BF

I know how hard it is to make realistic fight sequences air-to-air and this film does it. Other, later films have thrown a lot of money at these elements with a mixture of success, but what Wings has going for it is tons of authenticity. For a start they have authentic WW1 battle planes and surviving WW1 pilots. So definitely worth watching if only for these moments in the air.