Gary Cooper Wings 1927
by David Lee Guss
Title
Gary Cooper Wings 1927
Artist
David Lee Guss
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
"Gary Cooper (born Frank James Cooper; May 7, 1901 - May 13, 1961) was an American film actor known for his natural, authentic, and understated acting style and screen performances. His career spanned thirty-five years, from 1925 to 1960, and included leading roles in eighty-four feature films. He was a major movie star from the end of the silent film era through the end of the golden age of Classical Hollywood.
His screen persona appealed strongly to both men and women, and his range of performances included roles in most major movie genres. Cooper's ability to project his own personality onto the characters he played contributed to his appearing natural and authentic on screen. The screen persona he sustained throughout his career represented the ideal American hero.
Cooper began his career as a film extra and stunt rider and soon landed acting roles. After establishing himself as a Western hero in his early silent films, Cooper became a movie star in 1929 with his first sound picture, The Virginian."
Cooper is only on the screen in "Wings" for a few minutes but his natural charisma shines.
"Wings was an immediate success upon release and became the yardstick for which aviation films were measured against, in terms of 'authenticity of combat and scope of production.' One of the reasons for its resounding popularity was the public infatuation with aviation in the wake of Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight. The Air Corps who had supervised production expressed satisfaction with the end product. The critical response was equally enthusiastic and the film was widely praised for its realism and technical prowess, despite a superficial plot, 'an aviation picnic' as Gene Brown called it."
The combat scenes of the film were so realistic that one writer studying the film in the early 1970s was wondering if Wellman had used actual imagery of planes crashing to earth during World War I. One critic observed: 'The exceptional quality of Wings lies in its appeal as a spectacle and as a picture of at least some of the actualities of flying under wartime conditions. 'Another wrote: 'Nothing in the line of war pictures ever has packed a greater proportion of real thrills into an equal footage. As a spectacle, Wings is a technical triumph. It piles punch upon punch until the spectator is almost nervously exhausted.'
Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times praised the cinematography of the flying scenes and the direction and acting of the entire cast in his review dated August 13, 1927. Hall notes only two criticisms, one slight on Richard Arlen's performance and of the ending, which he described as 'like so many screen stories, much too sentimental, and there is far more of it than one wants.'"
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November 6th, 2016
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