Wings Available on NetFlix

If you’ve got a NetFlix subscription (and most of you probably do), there’s something you might want to check out. The 1927 film Wings is now available for streaming at NetFlix. It’s an important picture for three reasons. First, (unless you consider The Actor a silent movie) it remains the only silent film to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was the first Best Picture winner. Second, it’s the picture that made Gary Cooper a star.

Finally and most importantly its aerial combat scenes remain some of the greatest ever put on film. Keep in mind that this movie was made more than a half century before even primitive computer graphics-driven special effects were possible. We’ll never see anything like those scenes again.

4 comments… add one
  • steve Link

    Nice. Starting when my son was a freshman in high school we undertook the project of trying to find old movies to watch. We started with Birth Of A Nation and worked forward through a bunch of the old silents then into the 30s-40s. It was a lot of fun. This was one of those movies that was always on back order so we never got to watch it together. Will check it out.

  • sam Link

    Greatest aerial combat movie ever made. I recall reading that many of the pilots were actually WWI pilots. I’ve always been struck by the -to me- irony that the more beautiful aircraft became, the less beautiful they were to watch in the air. WWI aircraft were deadly butterflies.

  • The director, William Wellman, had been a combat pilot in WWI, just short of an ace. His insistence on realism was pretty frightening. Buddy Rogers had to learn to fly for the movie and actually did his own flying, at least by the end of shooting. Richard Arlen had been a pilot with the RCFF.

  • For those of you who have no interest in aviation, Wings also features the first cinematic use of male and female nudity in a major motion picture. And, yes, Clara Bow does appear topless.

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