WINGS to screen at Cleveland Silent Film Festival

If you are a movie goer that enjoys classic films, action-adventure, a bit of romance, or popular fare with great music, then the Cleveland Silent Film Festival and Colloquium has a film for you.

On Friday, February 18, the newly launched Cleveland Silent Film Festival will screen Wings, a film which holds two unique distinctions; it was the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. And secondly, Wings can rightly claim to have been the most popular film shown in Cleveland in the 1920s.

If that isn’t enough to pique your interest, this blockbuster film will be shown with a newly recorded reconstruction of the lavish musical score first heard at the film’s 1927 premiere. That score was composed by J.S. Zamecnik, a Cleveland-born composer widely regarded as one of the leading film composers of his time.

If you have never seen a silent film, Wings is the best place to begin. It is thrilling. The film is set during World War I, and stars “It” girl Clara Bow, Charles “Buddy” Rogers, and Richard Arlen. The latter two play pilots, as does Gary Cooper, who appears in a small role which helped launch his legendary career.

What sets Wings apart are the battles in the sky. Before Wings, there had been some aerial warfare shown in films, though actors were not seen in actual flight. Up to that time, in fact, many aerial scenes had been shot in stationary planes on the ground.

Director William A. Wellman, himself a decorated veteran of WWI, set out to achieve what no one else had attempted. Under Wellman’s direction, a large number of cameramen shot close-ups of flyers from the rear cockpits of planes while following dogfights from a near squadron-worth of camera planes. Wellman and his cameramen also devised other daring new techniques, and, at times, even had the film’s stars pilot their own planes while controlling mounted, motor-driven cameras that faced them.

The results were, in the words of the critics of the time, “amazing,” “impressive,” “startling” and “stupendous.” Notably, Wings also won an Academy Award for best visual effects.

Accompanied by a twenty-piece orchestra, Wings debuted in Cleveland at the old Colonial theater (Superior Ave. near E. 9th St.) on April 8, 1927. The film was a smash hit. An advertisement in the Plain-Dealer proclaimed “Cleveland Taken by Storm,” while Ward Marsh, the newspaper’s well regarded film critic, declared Wings, “one of the greatest pictures of the year – one of the great pictures in celluloid history.”

By all accounts, Wings proved extremely popular in Cleveland. And the film’s limited engagement was extended again and again. At a time when most new films played only a week, Wings enjoyed a record setting 13 week run, eclipsing an earlier record setter, D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East, by one week.

Along with Wings, the Cleveland Silent Film Festival is also set to screen Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), starring Buster Keaton, The Wedding March (1929), starring Erich von Stroheim, and Sunrise (1927), starring Janet Gaynor. Click to access the Festival’s Facebook Page which contains information on the various screenings and concerts as well as ticket information.

Thomas Gladysz is an arts journalist and the author of numerous articles on early film as well as a handful of books on the silent film star Louise Brooks. More at www.thomasgladysz.com