Wings
1929
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William A. Wellman was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and military pilot. He won an Oscar for his 1927 film Wings, and served in the French Foreign Legion during World War I.
Learn about the life and career of William A. Wellman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter-director of A Star Is Born and a World War I flying ace. Explore his filmography, awards, trivia, and personal details on IMDb.
- January 1, 1
- Brookline, Massachusetts, USA
- January 1, 1
- Los Angeles, California, USA
- Other Men’s Women (1931) Arguably Wellman’s most consistently rich period, his pre-code run of punchy 70-minute gems in the early 30s takes some beating.
- Night Nurse (1931) Come for the early performances from Barbara Stanwyck and Clark Gable, stay for what turns out to be one of Wellman’s toughest, strangest cookies.
- Wild Boys of the Road (1933) Another of his early best, Wild Boys of the Road sees Wellman at his most politically engaged. Downsizing the characters of Beggars of Life to a trio of kids, forced cross-country in a bid to find work and ease the burden on their suddenly-impoverished folks, the film pulls no punches confronting the grim slide into the social gutter of the Depression.
- A Star Is Born (1937) Given how many times even the official telling of the A Star Is Born narrative has been around the block (a fourth iteration with some combination of Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper and Beyoncé attached has been mooted for a while now), Hollywood clearly holds some stock in the timelessness of its most famous parallel rise-and-fall tale.
William A. Wellman was an American film director who won the first Academy Award for Best Picture for Wings in 1927. He also directed many other films in various genres, especially crime, adventure and aviation, and acted in some of his early works.
- Overview
- Early life and work
- Films of the 1920s
- Films of the early to mid-1930s
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William Wellman (born February 29, 1896, Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S.—died December 9, 1975, Los Angeles, California) American film director whose more than 80 movies included Hollywood classics of documentary-like realism and who was ranked as an action director alongside Howard Hawks and John Ford.
(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)
Wellman’s stockbroker father came from a family of means; his mother, an Irish immigrant, was a well-respected probation officer who testified before Congress about juvenile delinquency and whose charges included her son when Wellman was kicked out of high school in Newton, Massachusetts. After trying his hand at a number of jobs, Wellman became a ...
By 1923 Wellman was directing B-filmwesterns for the Fox Film Corporation (later Twentieth Century-Fox), and in 1926 he signed with Paramount. His third picture for that studio was Wings (1927), a World War I aviation drama written by former pilot John Monk Saunders and starring Clara Bow, Richard Arlen, and Charles (“Buddy”) Rogers (Gary Cooper also had a part). It shared with F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise what was in effect the first Academy Award for best picture. Wings reflected Wellman’s lifelong interest in aviation and his war experience while setting standards for documentary-like realism with its remarkable aerial camerawork and spectacular staging of airborne combat. Wellman and Saunders collaborated again on The Legion of the Condemned (1928), a tale about the Lafayette Escadrille that featured Cooper. For most of his career Wellman would work often and fast; as a result, many of his films were workmanlike and unremarkable, including his first partial sound film, Beggars of Life (1928), and the succession of underworld dramas and romances that followed during the late 1920s.
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In 1931 Wellman moved to Warner Brothers, where he directed 15 motion pictures over the next three years, including his next significant effort, The Public Enemy (1931), a genre-defining gangster saga that became one of the year’s biggest hits and launched James Cagney on the road to stardom. The Public Enemy had much to do with the establishment of the film Production Code in response to its realistic depiction of disreputable characters and callous violence, not least when Cagney’s cocky tough guy famously smashes a grapefruit into the face of a woman, played by Mae Clarke. Wellman’s next two films starred his favourite actress, Barbara Stanwyck, who played a fearless nurse who stands up to a gangster (Clark Gable) in Night Nurse (1931) and then played the lead in So Big (1932), a truncated version of Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. For the remainder of the early 1930s, Wellman made a series of melodramas—with some aerial adventure mixed in—before turning to the pre-Code gem Wild Boys of the Road (1933), a message film in the best Warner Brothers tradition about three Great Depression-ravaged kids who take to the road in search of a better life.
Having made seven films for Warner Brothers in 1933, Wellman ended his association with the studio and began a very successful period as a freelancer. Among his films from the mid-1930s were The Call of the Wild (1935), a major box-office success that starred Gable as the Yukon-conquering hero of Jack London’s novel of the same name; The President Vanishes (1934), a cautionary political tale that is memorable chiefly for providing one of Rosalind Russell’s earliest screen appearances; and the love story Small Town Girl (1936), which teamed Robert Taylor and Janet Gaynor.
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Learn about William Wellman, an American film director who made more than 80 movies, including classics of documentary-like realism and action. Explore his life, career, awards, and notable works, from Wings to The Ox-Bow Incident.
- Michael Barson
Documentary about one of Hollywood's most distinguished journeymen helmers - William "Wild Bill" Wellman (1896-1975) who drew on his experiences as a fighter pilot during World War I to create...
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Having directed nearly 80 motion pictures throughout his career, William Wellman was an extraordinarily prolific director whose output contained a number of cinematic gems amidst a rather unexceptional canon.
