The Wings of Eagles

This being Memorial Day weekend, TCM is running a bunch of war movies, as they always do. One that I haven't blogged about before is The Wings of Eagles, which is on tomorrow afternoon at 2:30 PM.

John Wayne plays Frank W. "Spig" Wead (1895-1947). At the start of the movie, Spig is stationed at the naval base in Pensacola, FL, where he's interested in combining naval operations with flight, something which was new in the early 1920s. His attempt to fly solo is a disaster, nearly getting him court-martialed, something which bothers his long-suffering wife Min (Maureen O'Hara).

Then the Army announces it's going to do the first round-the-world flight and Spig and his buddies, not wanting the Army to win, try to convince the Navy to sanction a similar flight that will beat the Army to the punch; all of this is more of an excuse to have Wayne and friends engage in fight scenes with the folks playing Army men.

Along the way, there's family strife for Spig. First, his infant son dies; then, his being away from Min all the time causes more problems since she's left to take care of the two other kids pretty much by herself. It's going to get even worse when Spig returns home one night to celebrate a promotion. He trips and falls down the stairs, resulting in his being paralyzed.

Slowly, he learns to walk again but clearly can't return to military service, so he winds up with a second career as a screen writer (The Wings of Eagles was released by MGM and the clip we see is of Wallace Beery and Clark Gable in Hell Divers, written by Wead and released by... MGM). This goes well until the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and Spig wants to contribute to the aircraft carrier problem.

Spig Wead sounds like a really interesting character; as such, it's only natural that Hollywood should eventually make a biopic about him. Unfortunately, The Wings of Eagles is the biopic we get. I found that this movie has two big problems: star John Wayne and director John Ford. I don't necessarily dislike John Wayne, but felt like he was the wrong person to play Wead. Not so much because Wayne was pushing 50 and Wead was much younger for most of the events depicted, but because this movie has John Wayne being John Wayne, which just doesn't work here.

Add to that the direction from John Ford. I've found myself having a diffident attitude to a lot of his post-war movies, and that stems from what I would describe as a ham-fisted bravado that permeates a lot of Ford's later movies. In the case of The Wings of Eagles, that manifests itself in the movie developing really slowly, with the opening scenes in Pensacola going on way too long, as well as the fight scenes between the Army and Navy, all of which just make Wead look like a jerk.

As always, however, you may want to judge for yourself, as there are a lot of other people who really like The Wings of Eagles. It did get a DVD release from the Warner Archive Collection, although it's another one that the TCM Shop oddly claimed is on backorder the last time I checked. You can get it off of Amazon, or which it on Prime Video if you do the streaming thing.