WINGS VS SUNRISE: TWO BEST PICTURE WINNERS?
As I was looking into the first Academy Award ceremony it surprised me that there were TWO Best Picture winners!
That’s not entirely true, William Wellman’s Wings was awarded Outstanding Picture while F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise was awarded Best Unique and Artistic Picture; however they were both considered top honors for the night. After that first year the category of Best Unique and Artistic Picture was done away with and Wings was declared the “First Best Picture Winner,” but does the film deserve that title?
Sunrise is considered one of the greatest films of all time, ranked 5th on Sight & Sound’s Top 100 list while Wings is mostly remembered for…being the first film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. I had to find out which is the true Best Picture.
Now…you could probably write a whole book about whether or not you can say whether or not there’s such a thing as a “Best Picture,” or whether you can ever judge art objectively. That’s not what I’m interested in, I’m interested in being as self-serving and biased as possible so I broke down how I’ll be deciding which is the better film:
Screenplay/Story
Cinematography/Production Design
Editing
Performances
Overall Impressions
Lets’ begin with…
TAKE MY WIFE…TO GET DROWNED PLEASE!
This feels silly to say, but there’s going to be spoilers for these almost one hundred year old movies.
Wings is the story of Jack Powell and David Armstrong, two men from the same small American town, both in love with the same small American girl, Sylvia. There’s also Mary Preston, the other small American girl, but this one is the girl next door who loves Jack. So…Mary loves Jack, Jack loves Sylvia, Jack thinks Sylvia loves him, but Sylvia loves David, David also loves Sylvia and knows that Jack (wrongly) thinks Slyvia loves Jack and they all love small American stuff. So much, in fact, that Jack and David enlist to become combat pilots in World War I. From there it’s your classic enemies to lovers trope that ends with a couple of totally straight army dudes kissing each other on the mouth.
Nice.
All the moments are there to create a really compelling story about Jack and David’s, ultimately tragic, relationship, but it feels more like we’re hitting each beat in between dogfights and military propaganda rather than connecting the dots, leading to a satisfying conclusion. Like the moment the two men turn from rivals to friends, they get into a fight during basic training. Jack is, quite frankly, kicking David's ass, but David keeps getting back up for more. This is the start of their friendship,
“Hey pal! You sure can take a beating!”
I understand, David has now earned Jack’s respect, but it was never about respect! They were vying for the affections of the same woman, it was about jealousy and ego. And it’s a shame because one scene later we have the two men discovering that their bunk mate, played by a young Gary Cooper, has been killed in a training exercise; which is a perfect moment for Jack and David to realize the gravity of the situation they’re in, put aside their differences and understand that they’re going to have to get along and rely on each other if they’re going to make it through this war.
And then you have the dogfights, that are spectacular and I’ll talk about them later, but instead of reinforcing the relationship between these two men; having to work together, having to rely on one another to get out of bad situations, they’re almost a break from the main story.
Sunrise is meant to be a fable, a parable about Man and Woman.
Those are their character names, do you get it?
(It’s about all of us!)
Man and Woman are married, but Man has been traipsing around town with that two-bit floozy from the city. So their marriage is on the rocks, but things get worse when that flapper tramp makes the oh-so-subtle suggestion that maybe Man’s wife could GET DROWNED! so they can run away together. He considers killing her, but ultimately doesn’t and the rest of the story is the couple reconnecting and falling back in love
…after her husband tried to murder her…
But he didn’t do it!
Thought about it…
But he didn’t do it!
You’re going to have to buy into the fact that this man just considered murdering his wife and she’s so dedicated to him that they end up at a carnival a few hours later. I’ll get into all of that in a little bit; however, if you’re willing to suspend that disbelief and look past the actual real world implications of that kind of spousal dynamic…I think Sunrise executes its story better than Wings.
The structure of the film is strange, the main conflict is resolved about halfway through (when he doesn’t murder his wife) and then the midsection of the film is vignettes of them reconnecting and falling back in love. But each little vignette has a mini arc to it; bonding over breaking a statue, chasing pigs.
And the Man gets a nice arc.
(we’ll get to how women are treated in both of these films).
We get a really sweet moment where the Man and Woman enter a church where a couple is getting married and the Man completes his transition from a brooding adulterer, ready to run out on his family for a new life and exciting woman to remembering why he committed to his wife in the first place. Again, all of that would be made stronger if he was just looking to run out on his family and not murder his wife.
I don’t think it’s perfect though, the pacing can be very slow, I think because the story is so thin. And right from the top this film is thick with melodrama:
“This song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere at any time. For wherever the sun rises and sets…in the city’s turmoil or under the open sky on the farm life is much the same; sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.”
We get it because who among us hasn’t tried to murder our wives?
Never mind.
But I do think because it’s framed as a fable, a fairy tale, a parable the melodrama helps sell us on that transition from murderer to lover. The otherworldliness of the cinematography and production design help as well, which brings us to…
LET THE GERMANS EXPRESS THEMSELVES
If you’re talking about cinematography in Wings the thing you’re going to be talking about are the dogfights. These sequences are beautiful and even more impressive when you take into account that cinematographer Harry Perry was essentially inventing these techniques for the film.
They used electric cameras strapped to the planes so the actors could start rolling when they were ready. And that means, yes, Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlan who played Jack and David were actually flying these planes and operating the cameras while giving these performances. The stuntmen on this film were out of their minds! Frank Clarke allowed his plane to go into a freefall, spiraling towards the ground as he lets his body be tossed about before finally pulling up at the last minute. Dick Grace broke his neck filming a plane crash.
Director William Wellman wanted the sky to be blue and there to be clouds in the sky to give the planes the right perspective, he said that he once waited thirty-three days for the right conditions to film. And he was right, it looks and feels as epic as any contemporary war movie.
But, while most people will only talk about the aerial scenes there is some really interesting work through the whole film. Of course the tracking shot through a Parisian cafe for which they built an original overhead rig. The shot of David and Sylvia on a swing. All of this in addition to the big beautiful setpieces.
However, where the cinematography in Wings is technically very impressive, it feels like it’s trying to be impressive while the camera work in Sunrise is not only impressive, it enhances the storytelling.
You can see the influences of German expressionism very clearly early on in the film while the Man is ensnared by the city woman. Harsh lights creating long, distinct shadows, his home almost feels like it’s closing in on him. You’ll also see a wall separating the Man and Woman early on in the film, visualizing the separation in their relationship. The wife is on the side of open doors and light while the husband is closed in and dark. In the first scene he even straddles the line, tortured about which way to go, ultimately choosing the city woman. Not long after that the Woman comes to see the decision the man has made and yet still comes over to his side.
Right after this moment we have another example of a great tracking shot, but one with purpose unlike the very beautiful tracking shot from Wings. The Man, on his way to meet the woman from the city makes his way through a foggy marsh, slowly, almost hesitantly we make our way with him until, through some brush we find the city woman, dressed all in black and lit only by a full moon nonchalantly waiting for him. It creates a ton of tension and gets at the emotional core of our story.
There’s the scene where we see the man wrestling with the decision he’s about to make and we get double exposure of the city woman seducing, showing how she’s worked her way into all of his thoughts. As they leave in their boat the church bells chime as the woman floats away, looking back, starting to get an ominous feeling.
MEN ARE BIG, DUMB BABIES
The editing in Sunrise is very clearly superior to that of the cutting in Wings. It’s more thoughtful, there’s more care taken between transitions, it’s very obvious, but the reason I’m including an editing section in this video is because I wanted to point out this one cut that is so good in Sunrise.
The Man and The City Woman are off canoodling in a marsh (the best place to canoodle if you ask me) and while this is going on we see the Woman at home consoling their child and putting them to bed. We cut from this embrace of mother and child to this almost exact match between the man and the city woman, with the man in the role of the child, being almost cradled by the city woman.
That one single cut says so much about this dynamic, how this man is a petulant child. It tells us that this man is going to allow himself to be told what to do by this woman like a child would with their mother. I love it!
GAYNOR? I BARELY KNOW ‘ER!
I said earlier that I wanted to talk more about how women are treated in these films and this is that section because, in my opinion, the only performances really worth talking about in these two films are from the two women, Clara Bow in Wings and Janet Gaynor in Sunrise.
The men are fine, Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlan in Wings, but the story is about two boys fighting over a girl, who go off to war and fall in
..to a really great friendship…
over the course of their experiences and I’m not sure I really saw that arc. They feel largely the same at the end of the story as they do at the beginning. And as for George O’Brien in Sunrise, I get that that style of acting was of the time, but whoa…and especially when you’re acting alongside Janet Gaynor who gives a really nuanced and thoughtful performance.
After the man has decided to kill his wife, he invites her off to the city with him to get her on the boat. He reaches out his hand to her and you see on her face a woman who has stayed faithful even though she’s been thrown aside for another woman. The hope and joy that fills her when she starts to think her husband may be finally coming back to her and their child. It’s tragic! Because you know what’s actually going on. It’s also a testament to her ablitiies that she makes it even somewhat believable that she would go back to the man after HE TRIED TO MURDER HER!
Clara Bow doesn’t get as much to do in Wings, but she does a lot with it. It’s clear why she was one of the biggest stars of her time, she’s very charming and has great comedic timing.
And I get it, it’s 1927, but come on! The women in both of these films are completely sidelined and marginalized. Sylvia, played by Jobyna Ralston in Wings, is just a plot device so that the men can have some sort of conflict. She’s not even in the film after the first fifteen minutes. And Clara Bow was “The It Girl” we couldn’t give her more to do in this film besides pine for a man? We don’t even get to see her do anything useful for the war effort besides giving the men a chance to ogle something.
And I don’t think I even need to say anything else about Sunrise, one woman is an evil temptress stealing a man from his family and the other is a good submissive wife who sticks by her man even after HE TRIES TO KILL HER! A man who pulls a switchblade on another man who was hitting on his wife…although this creep kind of deserved it.
IN CONCLUSION
I feel like I was really hard on Wings, but it’s a film that should be remembered for more than just being the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. And I can understand why it won Best Picture. It's a big epic, a spectacle with innovative camera work and a compelling story.
Is it better than Sunrise? No, it is not. Even with all it’s flair it can’t beat the craftsmanship of Sunrise, which is well-deserving of its place as one of the best early films ever made. But if you are at all interested in film or film history I would highly recommend you check out both of these movies.
