Wings (1927) (review)

On August 12, 1927, the curtain rose on the grand premiere of Wings, William Wellman’s two-million-dollar epic of the sky starring Charles “Buddy” Rogers, Richard Arlen, and Clara Bow. Boasting thrills and adventure, star power, and unparalleled aerial photography, the film was an immediate smash, running at New York’s Criterion Theater for sixty-three consecutive weeks and capturing the top honor for Outstanding Production at the inaugural Academy Awards ceremony. Eighty-five years later, and in celebration of the studio’s centennial anniversary, Paramount Pictures has completed a new restoration, which is now available in both Blu-ray and DVD editions.

Advertised as utilizing the best surviving material, the restoration is based on a black-and-white 1950s dupe negative from the Paramount vault.¹ Led by Tom Burton at Technicolor, the 2K digital restoration focused on image stabilization, image repair, and dust and dirt removal. According to Burton, the restoration artists took care not to go overboard by over-cleaning, overcorrecting, or removing grain, noting that “digital restoration should be like hiking in the wilderness: nobody should know you were there.”² True to his word, the restoration successfully avoids the all-too-common tendency to overstabilize the image, and care was obviously taken to retain an appropriate level of grain. Indeed, though the restored visuals significantly improve the image quality, the overall presentation still very much looks like a film.

In addition to restoring the image, the film’s original color tinting and Handschiegl stencil coloring were also digitally resurrected. Though the team lacked an original colored print for side-by-side comparison, access to the Paramount script provided guidance for digitally reapplying the colors.³ Digital techniques were also employed to re-create the Handschiegl color effects indicated in the script. The simulated yellow-gold stenciling is used exclusively in aerial battle sequences and specifically highlight machine gun fire and the flames of burning planes spiraling earth-ward. While the overall tinting was deftly accomplished, the Handschiegl reproduction seems less successful. The precise feathering of the applied color, particularly the flames of doomed biplanes, appears too fine and precise for the original effect it attempts to reproduce.

The disc presents two options for musical accompaniment, and though both are representative of what late-1920s audiences would have experienced, neither can lay claim to precise reproduction. The disc’s primary selection is an adaptation of J. S. Zamecnik’s original 1927 road show score, orchestrated and arranged by Domink Hauser and featuring piano interpolations composed and performed by Frederick Hodges. Interpreting Zamecnik’s score, rather than simply performing it, was necessary for several reasons. Following common practice of the day, Zamecnik had combined original composition with classical pieces as well as popular songs and library cues. However, much of this quoted material was unavailable for the restoration because of cost and rights issues. According to Hauser,

about half the music [Zamecnik’s original score] in the movie are licensed tunes, because Zamecnik didn’t have enough time to write a score for the whole movie. So he wrote a lot of main themes for the characters and some of the major scenes he scored. But then there were a lot of Sousa marches, for example, which we couldn’t clear. So we just switched them out to other marches.⁴

Additional adaptations were necessary to compensate for sections where Zamecnik’s score as printed did not match the edit of the film print used as the basis for the restoration, such as the scene in the French café changing room, where, according to Hauser, “the score was quite a mess and nothing really fit.”⁵

The second option for musical accompaniment is a theater organ score composed and performed on a Wurlitzer pipe organ by Gaylord Carter. The performance, recorded in 1987, was originally featured on Paramount Home Video’s VHS and Laserdisc editions. While Carter’s accompaniment pays little heed to Zamecnik’s published score, it faithfully reproduces the musical experience that many audiences of the period would have enjoyed. As Thomas Mathiesen...