One Summer: America, 1927

wife, he might not have been quite so generous.
    Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big films – and at $2 million Wings was the biggest film Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a First World War flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage.
    Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille air squadron. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor.Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now directed one of the most intelligent, moving and thrilling pictures ever made.
    Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside aeroplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, providing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.
    Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously recreated on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as 5,000 extras and sixty aeroplanes in some scenes – an enormous logistical exercise. The army sent its best aviators from Selfridge Field in Michigan – the very men with whom Lindbergh had just flown to Ottawa – and stunt flyers were used for the more dangerous scenes. Wellman asked a lot of his airmen. One pilot was killed, another broke his neck, and several more sustained other serious injuries. Wellman did some of the more dangerous stunt-flying himself. All this gave the movie’s aerial scenes a realism and immediacy that many found almost literally breathtaking. Wellman captured features of flight that had never been caught on film before – the shadows of planes moving across the earth, the sensation of flying through drifting smoke, the stately fall of bombs and the destructive puffs of impact that follow.
    Even the land-bound scenes were filmed with a thoughtfulness and originality that set Wings apart. To bring the viewer into aParisian nightclub, Wellman used a boom shot in which the camera travelled through the room just above table height, skimming over drinks and between revellers, before arriving at the table of Arlen and Rogers. It is an entrancing shot even now, but it was rivetingly novel in 1927. ‘ Wings ,’ wrote Penelope Gilliatt simply in the New Yorker in 1971, ‘is truly beautiful.’ Wings was selected as best picture at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Wellman wasn’t even invited to the ceremony.
     
    Despite its entrancing aerial sequences and affecting story of bravery, camaraderie and loss, many people went to Wings not to thrill at the aerial acrobatics but to gaze in admiration and longing at its female lead, the enchanting Clara Bow.
    Bow was just twenty-two years old in 1927, but already a Hollywood veteran. Her background could not have been tougher. She was born into poverty in the Bay Ridge district of Brooklyn and was raised by a mother who was frequently drunk and always dangerously unstable. Once as a child Clara awoke to find her mother holding a knife to her throat. (Eventually Mrs Bow was committed to an asylum.)
    Bow arrived in Hollywood in 1923, having won a