“Welcome to a merry little war,” reads one intertitle in 1927’s “Wings,” the Best Picture winner at the first ever Oscars. “Wings” goes to show that war movies winning Hollywood’s biggest prize are as old as the award itself, but this war film looks fondly and lightly on World War I, an otherwise grim and consequential period of American History. “Wings” sets the spoils of war and the global turmoil as the backdrop to a sprawling, action driven melodrama and feels somewhat cheaper for it.
“Wings” has this in common with 1931’s Best Picture winner, “Cimarron,” a Western about the pioneers at the Oklahoma Land Rush in 1889 who built the settlement, town, region and then state from the ground up. It too has a complex setting of moral ambiguity, racial intolerance and gender inequality made weaker by a muddled narrative of nostalgia, conquest and a shoot-out or two.
To ask that both “Wings” and “Cimarron” be progressive is probably a stretch for movies as old as they are, but these are Best Picture winners forever given a place on film history lists, and although they hold up better than could be expected, they’re troublesome entries among many other great films in that time period and throughout Oscar’s legacy. The curious cinephile will find some surprising spectacle and production value in each film, but both “Wings” and “Cimarron” are ultimately non-essential in the Best Picture canon. Continue reading “Side by Side: Wings and Cimarron”