Wings

It’s the first film to ever win the Academy Award for Best Film, and 85 years later it’s still a heck of a lot of fun to watch, particularly if all you think of when you think of ‘silent movies’ is the slapstick comedy of Laurel & Hardy or the Keystone Cops. It’s the story of two best friends who go off to war, leaving their sweetheart behind to pine away waiting for them. Only there’s a twist or two thrown in to make the familiar feel brand new, like the way one of the girls (Clara Bow) isn’t content to stay behind and goes off to fight the war her own way. With a running time of more than 2 ½ hours, the film drags in spots, particularly in the scenes of one of the flyboys getting drunk on champagne during a Parisian furlough, but the exciting aerial footage makes up for it, particularly when you realize they were filmed long before Hollywood had discovered computer generated cheats.