kisses and poses
by Douglas Messerli
Hope Loring and Louis D. Lighton, screenplay,
based on a story John Monk Sauders; titles by Julian Johnson), William A.
Wellman (director) Wings / 1927
You might argue that William A. Wellman was
one of the first Hollywood directors who seemed to actually care about
representing a diverse selection of American society in his films. True, these
figures were often rooted in simple types, but over his long career a diverse
representation of social, political, and sexual figures appear in his works,
pointing to numerous lesser-discussed aspects of the mythical melting pot that
American culture had long been perceived to be.
His first major film, winner of what might be described as the first
Best Picture Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, is a perfect
example.* Although most of the film focuses on the mass of humanity into which
war generally transforms individuals, Wellman—despite the complaints of some
critics including the usually perceptive, but with regard to this film
seemingly myopic Daniel Egan in his book on the National Film Registry—spends
the first fourth of his movie establishing archetypal figures such as the good
looking All-American boy, Jack Powell (Charles “Buddy”
Rogers) souping up his car to become the hot rod “The Shooting Star”; the pesky
tomboy-girl next door, Mary Preston (Clara Bow) who’s loved Jack since she was
and he were kids; the ethereal “outsider,” new-to-town beauty with whom Jack
imagines he is in love, Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston); and the handsome, suave,
rich boy, David Armstrong (Richard Arlen), with whom Sylvia is truly “in
love.”
Along the way, Wellman introduces further types, including the fairly
obnoxious immigrant stereotype Herman Schwimpf—played by the German-born actor
who performed as the mumbling, bumbling Swedish “Ole” under the name El
Brendel, but here seems also to be doubling as a Dutchman—and numerous others.
Yet, typical for this director, the molds into which these types are
generally bound are all quickly broken, as we discover the complexity of their
true beings forged through an introduction to the wider world and their
interrelationships with one another, which is really what Wings and
other Wellman’s other films are very much concerned. Whereas directors such as
Frank Capra or even Charles Chaplin might have left these types as he found
them, for Wellman the “cast” is cracked in order to transform his figures into
the four-dimensional human beings they become. Even the most stubborn stock
figure, El Brendel, is transformed as in the film he develops into a talented
and very capable mechanic who very much cares about the air pilots and their
machines he looks after.
In this particular film, set against the backdrop of international
events, the focus is almost entirely upon the male characters. Even actress
Clara Bow realized from the start that she was not an important figure in
Wellman’s scheme of things: “Wings is...a man's picture and I'm just the
whipped cream on top of the pie.”
Yet this was a “man’s picture” in a far different manner than Hollywood
had ever seen males depicted. The cameo feature of Gary Cooper as Cadet White,
an experienced air pilot who meets up
with the younger trainees for the World War I version of the Army Air Force,
establishes the archetypal heterosexual male figure: the quiet, determined
he-man who sleeps for much of the time that he’s on the screen, catching-up on
lost hours when he’s been flying, and who when called for dawn patrol,
introduces himself and readies to face the daily odds of survival, gently
dismissing the two new trainees’—Powell and Armstrong—dependency on protective
tokens such as the tiny childhood bear David carries with him and the silver
locket wherein lies Sylvia’s picture that Jack wears around his neck.
The suggestion is already posited that Jack and David are somehow less
masculine that Cadet White, different in their obvious weaknesses, including
the fact that, despite entering training hating one another, but through a
boxing match coming to respect and truly like one another and forging a “close”
friendship as the two bunk together. White obviously goes it alone and faces up
to facts, proven by the moment that he enters what the film describes as the
“heavenly sea” when his plane crashes back to earth killing him.
The incident is also Wellman’s first indication that his film, while
often seeming to glorify battle, belongs also to the growing tradition of films
that will reveal the horrors of war.
Wellman, who himself served during World War I as a combat pilot—when he
isn’t busy wowing his viewers with his remarkably ability to provide his
audience with true ariel film footage imitating the real dangers and terrifying
encounters of airplane battle, which many have argued is what this film does
best—turns his attention to that different kind of heterosexual male for whom
friendship becomes something more than a handshake, smile, and collegial pat on
the back or ass, but spills over into something that gets messy, coming
dangerously close in the loving relationship between the boys that hints at
homosexual feelings. No, these boys apparently—although we can never be
certain—don’t have sex and, given half a chance, can’t wait to put their arms
around a good looking girl to give her a smooch.**
Yet Wellman’s camera catches the beautiful young men side by side on
ground, in their tent, or other barrack quarters almost swooning over one
another. As Vito Russo splendidly summed it up in his The Celluloid Closet:
“In William A. Wellman’s Wings...Richard
Arlen and Charles Buddy Rogers have a more meaningful relationship with each
othes than either then has with Jobyna Ralston or Clara Bow, both token love
interests whom male adolescents all over America correctly identified as “the
boring parts” of the movie. In fact Arlen and Rogers have the only real love
scene in Wings, and Rogers learns the true meaning of love through his
relationship with his buddy.....”
Already in December 1926 and January 1927 Clarence Brown—another
filmmaker who dared to hone-in on character stereotypes which he might expand
into complex human beings—had given the audiences of the period a vision of
soldiers loving the same woman (in this case made even more complex given actor
John Gilbert’s notorious offscreen affair with Greta Garbo) who, by film’s end,
realized that their love for one another was far more important than dueling
over a woman. Even eschewing incidents and language from novelist Hermann
Sudermann’s far-more homoerotic fiction on which the film was based, Brown
establishes—as Garbo rushes out to stop her lovers from their duel and drowns
in the cold water on her journey to their “sacred” island—that the two have
developed something far deeper than a strong male-bonding as they embrace and
walk off together into the future.
Wellman, basing his May 1927 film on a story by John Monk Saunders
appears not to go as far Brown had, finally awarding Jack, when David dies, the
girl next door Mary as his lifetime companion. But Clara Bow was certainly on
to something when she described that final kiss allowed with the fall of a
shooting star, as nothing but whipped cream. For it’s already been established
not only that Jack doesn’t know whether or not he “truly” loves Mary, but he
doesn’t quite know what love between a man and a woman is all about. While he
confesses to Mary that he has (maybe) had sex with a French woman in Paris
during the war—later in his life Wellman, who was married four times in the US,
confessed to having had an earlier French wife who died during the War—what he
doesn’t know is that it was really Mary in his hotel room who, a female soldier
herself, had come to sober up her boyfriend so that he could return to camp as
required. And they had no sex since he was more interested in champagne bubbles
than in the bodies that produced them.
And, although by film’s end he finally kisses Mary—something she’s been
trying to get him to do all throughout the film—he has already far more
intensely kissed his friend David on the lips as he was dying in a French ruin,
after being shot down by Jack who, since his friend was flying in a stolen
German plane, he believed to be the enemy. That deep
kiss on the lips might be described as others have argued, as the first genuine
queer male kiss in US cinema history. He carries him off, moreover, in a manner
that suggests the pietĆ , which will later become a trope of the early gay
“coming out” films.
But
even before that occasion in the movie, discovering that on the back of Jack’s
precious photograph of Sylvia, she had inscribed, “With love to David,” David
had torn up the picture incurring Jack’s wrath. But in so doing, Jack had also,
symbolically speaking, destroyed the object of his own heterosexual desire,
proving instead his homosexual devotion to Jack. And even Wellman, a product
after all of his own society, could imagine no other future for his young hero
than death. Almost immediately David has the feeling that his time has come, asking
Jack to be certain to deliver up his medal and beloved mascot to his parents
back home, Jack scoffing at David’s dark prognostications.
In that day’s foray against a monstrous
German airplane Gotha, Jack succeeds in shooting it down while David takes on
the two smaller Fokker E.III Eindecker’s accompanying it, one of which
eventually shoots him down in German territory. David survives, only to steal a
German Fokker plane and attempt to fly back to the Allied line on the day
beginning the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, when Jack shoots him down resulting
finally in his death. As Jack later packs up his loved one’s possessions, he
discovers the torn-up photo as well as Sylvia’s letter declaring her love for
David, suddenly realizing that he was not loved as he imagined by Sylvia, but
was loved deeply by David.
If
“normality” is restored in this film, we recognize it will be only a cover for
one true love Jack has ever known, that of David who sacrificed himself for the
sake of his male lover. If love has meaning in this work, it is defined only by
the relationship and “friendship” of Jack and David.
Wellman has not truly “coded” this film, representing that love through
the concept of pure and unsullied male comradeship, something heterosexuals
have superficially accepted throughout history and was permitted when it came
to cinematic depictions of cowboys, athletes, soldiers, and prisoners, locked
away in worlds where women were forbidden or in short supply—related as Russo
hints to the Peter Pan myth where male comradeship was not yet necessary given
the “lost” boys’ refusal to grow up and take on heterosexual male
responsibilities (which also explains, in part, why male/male sexuality is
sometimes overlooked in the rom-com movies of raunchy teenage adventures and
angst, sometimes moving terribly close to gay “coming out” sagas). Yet our
society to this day refuses to identify that “comradeship” as being fully
homosexual or queer. And as Wellman continued to explore these issues in later
films such as his movie of the following year, Beggars of Life, he
realized he would need to “code” or hide similar homosexual and even lesbian
tendencies in his cinema.
There will be countless readers, surely, who utterly dismiss or at least
feel highly uncomfortable with readings such as mine, Russo’s, and the numerous
other critics, gay and straight, who have observed that in this film Wellman
took the male bonding from the shower room into the army cot. Surely, I can
hear them argue, Wellman meant nothing of the sort. What he represented was
merely a close friendship which young men away from home often forge in
wartime situations when they are forced to
rely on their fellow soldiers for their very survival—certainly my father’s
words if he had deigned to even respond to my sexual insinuations.
Yet Wellman has well prepared for that, underlining his homosexual
depictions with a wonderful scene in a large Paris bar where his camera on a
crane brilliantly tracks straight through tables of the room’s various habituĆ©s
catching them in brief tableaux to indicate their various relationships: a
heterosexual couple arguing, a sailor and his girlfriend, a male and female
appearing be making some exchange of valuable items, and a lesbian couple,
dressed in suits, in which one of the women gently reaches
up and over to stroke the cheek of the other, all
before his camera settles itself upon the table where we see Jack drunk sitting
next to a whore and other soldier friends and their recently obtained
girlfriends. In his study of queer cinema Screened Out, Richard Barrios
suggests it may have been Wellman’s “way of condemning French liberality, but
most likely...meant simply as a bit of spicey scene-setting.” Quite the
opposite, I argue that it was one of the numerous subtle ways Wellman had of
telling his audience that he was serious about the issue of same-sex love. Here
were yet other “types” whose molds waited to be cracked open, the butterfly of
their lives escaping into celluloid reality.
Similarly, and perhaps less subtly, early in the film Wellman presents
us with male nudity in the background of the induction center where El Brendel
signs up. And in one of the film's very first frames, Jack, sprawling out on
the grass, unexpectedly and inexplicably raises his legs over his head to
expose to the camera his butt. When the two boys receive their French medals
for heroism, the director's camera focuses several moments on the procedure as
the officer giving out the awards kisses each man on both cheeks, as if to
emphasize that there is a significant difference between the French cultural
expression of greeting and friendship and a long kiss on the lips which Jack
awards his beloved David. In each of these instances the director emphasizes
the male body and male relationships in a manner in which no other US director
had previously explored. Wellman's positing of a fully loving relationship
between his two hometown airmen, in short, is not an anomaly, an oddity, or
even an abnormality, but another reality, another tableau in the vast array of
human experience.
It
is also notable that when Jack finally gets up the courage to visit David’s
dour parents to present them with his companion’s sacred objects, the medal and
the tiny teddy bear from his childhood, David’s mother refers to Jack as
John—the first and only time this character is addressed by his given name—to
reiterate his relationship with her beloved son, signifying the biblical
connections with David’s love of Jonathan, the love that surpasses the love of
all women. Is it any wonder that Jack almost breaks down in the tears not
usually allowed male leads of any kind, particularly not a war hero of the
significance of “The Shooting Star.” Surely Cadet White would never have shed a
tear.
I
argue that Wellman’s work, along with Mauritz Stiller’s similarly titled film The
Wings (1916), Richard Oswald’s Different from the Others (1919),
Theodore Dreyer’s Michael (1924), and Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the
Devil (1926), is one of the five most significant LGBTQ films of early,
silent movie history.
Let’s be honest, Wings impressed its audiences and won awards for
Wellman’s truly impressive aerial photographer and his ability to amass Cecil
De Mille-like crowds to portray the endless battlelines of World War I
warriors. And his film makes equally important statements about the hellish
crucible of war, that destroys lives and forges new relationships between both
men and women.
His
depiction of male love, however, could never after be erased from cinematic
history and its influence over the years, in films as various as William
Dieterle’s Sex in Chains (1928), Leontine Sagan’s Girls in Uniform
(1931), Dudley Murphy’s The Sport Parade (1932), Jean GrĆ©millon’s Lady
Killer (1937), Victor Fleming’s Test Pilot (1939), Howard Hawks’ Only
Angels Have Wings (1939), and Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952),
to name but a handful of films focusing on same sex love in worlds separated or
isolated from the opposite sex. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005)
might be described as the great-grandchild of Wellman’s Wings, if we
were interested in imagining movies spawning celluloid babies.
I
have to admit, I’m not fond of war films, but I cried at several points along
the way while watching Wings. But then, after all, I’m not a manly man
and have permitted myself to cry whenever I feel like it.
The
restoration of this film was made possible through the discovery of a spare
negative in Paramount’s vaults used in the 1950s reissue of this film across
the US. Suddenly, I realized that other than the great musicals Oklahoma!
and Carousel that I had shared with my parents in the early 1950s at an
Iowa drive-in theater at age 6 or 7, I had long had a vague memory of a wartime
air movie with a lot of airplanes in it, which must have been that reissue of Wings.
My father had served as an Air Force bombardier in World War II, and loved to
watch any movie with airplanes in it.
* In fact that first year there were two top
awards, one for outstanding production and another for “artistic” production.
F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise won the latter, while Wellman’s Wings won
the former
** Arlen was a skilled pilot when hired for
his role, and Rogers, pioneering the territory that today someone like Tom
Cruise occupies, learned how to pilot his plane for the film stunts.
Los Angeles, November 23, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November
2021).
