The United States of America, at the start of the twentieth century, and Johnny Powell is the wild boy of his dependable, middle-class neighbourhood.
When Johnny is given a car, he sets about converting it into a racer, much to the displeasure of local residents and the shame of his father. What Johnny does not realise is that, in using the car to woo fellow university student Sylvia, he is also breaking the heart of his lifelong friend Mary-Louise Preston, who has secretly loved him for years. Sylvia, in turn, is in love with one David Armstrong. With the stifling attitudes of his parents and neighbours closing in on him, Johnny looks for a way to escape, and to pursue his desire to fly. With the Great War raging in Europe, Johnny enlists and is accepted into the US forces as an airman.
Believing that Sylvia returns his love, and confident in his likely flying and combat abilities, Johnny feels invincible as he sets off for training. However, while his knowledge of engines and natural skills as an airman are clear, his lingering immaturity is, ultimately, Johnny's greatest liability.
When he is posted to France alongside David Armstrong, Johnny is brought up against the realities and brutalities of war, as well as the complications of love and loss. Over time, Johnny and David develop a camaraderie and friendship that supports both men through the war – until tragedy strikes.
Returning from war in 1919, Johnny is a changed man, much more thoughtful and wise than the speed-loving, risk-taking youth who left. Back in the arms of his family, and Mary-Louise, he looks forward to a post-war world and the life that awaits him, conscious of how his future – and the futures of his friends and neighbours – have been forever changed by the far-off war in France.
Wings is based on a silent film by Paramount, the first film ever to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, and has been praised for its exploration of the emotional impact of the Great War upon its pilots.
PART I
THE SHOOTING STAR
Johnny Powell was mowing the race when Dr. MacRoberts came down Mulberry Street in his new Ford runabout. Everyone in the neighborhood, practically, knew that the Doctor had bought himself a flivver. An unworldly little man of uncertain temper, he had long scorned motors and motorists and his capitulation to the new notion of progress had been as abrupt as unexpected.
He had insisted, after one impatient lesson at the wheel, that he was quite competent to operate the machine by himself, and Johnny Powell happened to be an eyewitness to the Doctor’s maiden voyage in his new craft.
One thing the salesman had neglected to explain to the Doctor and that was that the front wheels of a flivver sometimes take to wabbling from side to side in an eccentric and unaccountable manner. “Shimmying,” we called it then — this was in 1916 B.C. (Before the Charleston).
When therefore, in the middle of the block, the front wheels of the Doctor’s car elected to flutter, like a trout’s tail, the Doctor was disconcerted. Here was an emergency for which he was untutored. He pursued the only course he knew; he applied the foot brake and turned sharply in to the curb.
As a line of procedure under these circumstances, this was eminently correct. The only fault to be found with the Doctor’s strategy was that, in his perturbation, he came down on the accelerator instead of the brake. The flivver, instantly inspired, hurdled the curb, tore through the shrubbery and climbed Johnny Powell’s lawn. Halfway up the engine stalled and the car promptly started to slip backwards.
The Doctor emitted a despairing wail and Johnny; dropped the handle of his lawn-mower, leaped to the running board and gave the steering wheel a half-turn which brought the car to rest crosswise on the slope.
Dr. MacRoberts, whose dignity had been sadly jounced, descended with splendid hauteur, clapped his hat on his head, shot his cuffs, and stalked off in high dudgeon.
Johnny Powell ran after him. “I’ll get it down for you, Doctor.”
The Doctor did not check his stride nor turn his head.
“It’s yours,” he snapped with gesture of complete repudiation and continued his furious march to the trolley line.
Johnny fell back. A little dubious, he eased the abandoned flivver down across the sidewalk and onto the street. Then he went to work on the rhododendron bushes in the parking strip, cutting out the broken stalks and straightening the crushed branches. He approximated the fractured edges of a baby elm (his father would be distressed about that) and bound up the broken shaft with bicycle tape. Then he trod out the wheel marks in the soft turf on the terrace and went inside to fetch his mother.
“See my new car,” he said, pointing from the porch.
His mother regarded the new flivver uncertainly.
“Whose is it?” she asked.
“Mine,” said Johnny.
“How is it yours?”
“Doctor MacRoberts gave it to me.”
“Why — how — ” began his mother, puzzled.
Johnny told her what had happened. “Ah, yes,” said his mother understand-ingly — she was not unacquainted with the Doctor’s caprices, “you must take it right back to him.”
“But he’s gone down town.”
“Well, leave it in front of his house then.”
“But he said it was mine —”
“I know, son. But he didn’t mean it — really. Take it back.”
Johnny took it back, with very bad grace. But at four Mrs. MacRoberts called up Johnny’s house and told Johnny’s mother that Johnny was to come and take the car out of the Doctor’s sight. If he didn’t want to keep it, said Mrs. MacRoberts (to whom the Doctor’s tempers were not funny), he was to take it down and run it into the lake. The Doctor had probably damaged the Powell lawn more than the thing was worth and besides the Doctor didn’t want to be reminded of the accident — ever.
That was how Johnny Powell got his flivver.
It can’t be said that Johnny’s parents shared Johnny’s elation over his windfall. On the contrary, knowing Johnny’s temperament, they regarded the gift with grave apprehension.
Johnny’s father had persistently refused to have a car in the family, at least while Johnny was at the University, because he believed that it would prove too great a distraction for the boy. He would drive it like the wind, he would be eternally tinkering with it and would want to take it out at night. It would be a constant temptation to his son and a source of anxiety to his mother. So the elder Powell had gotten an electric brougham for Johnny’s mother, a vehicle which Johnny resolutely disdained to be seen in.
Mrs. Powell derived some comfort from the fact that Johnny’s new car was only a Ford. Fords didn’t go very fast, did they? And you didn’t hear of young boys and girls going on wild joy-rides in Fords? It was the high-powered cars…
Could Johnny’s mother have seen the bright vision in Johnny’s blue eyes as he surveyed his gift-horse she would not have been so tranquil in her mind. For Johnny saw not the erect, black respectable Ford roadster, but a low-swung, stream-lined raceabout with a flaming yellow bonnet and a couple of bucket seats behind.
Boy! All you had to do was to strip ’er down, change the gearing, take off the mudguards and muffler and repaint the hood and wheels. Here was a job for Johnny’s gifted hands.
Mary-Louise Preston was sitting on the steps of her back porch with a peasant bowl between her knees, shelling peas, when Johnny ran the car up the driveway and into his back yard. An alley, a clean, white cement-paved alley (all alleys were like that in Temple, Washington — at least in the residential section) was all that separated the back yards of the Prestons and the Powells. The Powell residence faced east on Mulberry Street, whereas the Prestons’ looked west upon Beech, so their respective back yards adjoined each other — that is except for the alley way which ran through the entire block.
Now there is a saying that there is no romance in a girl from your own home town. If that is true then there is still less romance in a girl whose back yard faces your own.
Johnny Powell had grown up with Mary-Louise Preston and he didn’t know how pretty she was. Her fresh young skin, her evenly cut lips, and dark eyes would have bemused almost anybody; especially as she sat now, in a blue, short-sleeved print dress with a yellow bowl between her knees and the sun splintering against her blue-black hair.
Still you could hardly blame Johnny if he wasn’t quickened to Mary’s beauty. He saw her a dozen times a day on commonplace errands for her mother and there was little, if anything, about her that he did not know. Take her unmentionables, for instance, her pink slips and her step-ins and her panties. They were exposed to Johnny’s eye every Tuesday when Amy, the colored laundress (she came to the Powells’ on Mondays), flung them to the breezes on the Preston clothes-line.
Mary was no breathless mystery to Johnny, and it was a pity because Mary adored Johnny Powell.
“New car?” she called across in quick astonishment.
“Yep.”
Mary put down her bowl and came over to see. She was a little hurt because she was invariably apprised of everything that transpired in Johnny’s life and certainly he had told her nothing about this.
“Flivver?”
“Yep.”
“Thought your father wouldn’t let you have a car.”
“He changed his mind.” Johnny took up the seat, pulled out a kit of tools, unrolled them, selected a screw driver and a wrench and went to work on the right door hinge. Presently he lifted it off and stood it against the garage wall.
“Taking it apart?” Mary’s voice was incredulous.
“That’s right.”
“What for?”
“Goin’ to strip ’er down.”
“Make a racer out of it!”
“Sure.”
Mary clapped her hands. “Going to paint it too? Let me paint it for you, Johnny! Let me. Let me paint it!”
“All right,” said Johnny, taking off the other door.
“What color, Johnny? Blue? Red? Yellow?”
“Yellow.”
So it was agreed that when the car was ready, Mary should do the painting. She was very good at it, Johnny knew; she had painted much of the furniture in the Preston house and had decorated two of the upstairs rooms. Besides that she painted water colors and things.
Mary didn’t go to the University. Not that her father couldn’t send her. Temple was a university town and he might have managed all right. But Mary liked to paint and to practice on the piano and she could keep that up at home and anyway her mother wasn’t always well and it was nice to have Mary at home.
Johnny Powell went to the University but his father, who was the Renaissance history professor there, wasn’t at all sure that it was the right place for him. The truth of the matter was that Johnny wasn’t faring any too well in his studies. In his required subjects especially, civics, economics, history and English literature. He was a good boy, his father told his mother, but he lacked a little of purpose.
His outstanding traits appeared to be his fondness for mechanics and his passion for speed. There wasn’t a device in the Powell household that didn’t work with smoothness and precision. If a stubborn window catch bruised his mother’s thumb, Johnny, with an oil-can and a screw driver, had the thing working, click-click, in no time. There wasn’t a door-hinge that squeaked, not a faulty light-connection, not a stiff lock mechanism in Johnny’s house. They all yielded to Johnny’s knowledgeable hands.
And what a pair of hands they were. Long straight flat-tipped fingers with well-kept nails. They were the hands of a surgeon, of a pianist or a thimble-rigger. There was knowledge in the finger tips, strength in the slim wrists. They were hands that could manage the wheel of a motor car — or, say, the controls of an airplane.
Johnny’s bent for speed evidenced itself in many ways. He mowed the lawn with such a dash and clatter as to be practically enveloped in a cloud of grass ends as he raced from one side of the terrace to the other. When he was called upon to wax and polish the hardwood floors (as he was every Saturday morning) he zipped the weighted brush hack and forth with such speed as to raise a blister on the surface of the oak.
As a boy, Johnny had the fastest roller coaster on the street, the swiftest sled on the hill, and nobody in the neighborhood could keep up with him on a bicycle. His father trembled to think what he would do with a motor car.
And now he had his car. To his father’s consternation, his mother’s dismay and to Mary’s delight he went earnestly at the business of stripping down the Ford.
Now stripping down a flivver is not so simple as it sounds. True, the body comes off easily enough; there are only about eight bolts holding it down, and the fenders drop off when you loosen up a couple of nuts.
But when you get down to the chassis your troubles have only begun — if you really mean to have a raceabout. In the first place a flivver is too light and too high up in the air to hold the road when you get going. If you want to go over fifty and still keep your rear wheels from kicking off the ground you’ve got to undersling. Set the front axle ahead a few inches and suspend the engine from the spring with a couple of wishbone attachments. And you’ve got to get underslung parts. Johnny sent away for those.
You can’t get much more than forty-five miles an hour out of a Ford — except downhill. If you want more speed there are two ways of getting it. One is to put in overhead valves and the other is to change the gear ratio. Johnny Powell did both.
He wrote away for a new set of cylinder heads and speed-gears. By opening up the differential housing and slipping in the new wheels he lowered the gear ratio from 3½-1 to 3-1. The car wouldn’t be so fast on the pick-up, but, oh boy, on the straightaway!
Johnny wanted very badly to buy a racing body for the car but the new gears and valves ate up all his spare money, so he had to content himself with a wooden frame which he bolted to the chassis.
The tinsmith across the bridge fashioned a couple of bucket seats for him which he set up at an angle behind the wheel. From the car-wreckers behind Boyle’s Garage he got, for $3.00, the gasoline tank “off an old Stutz” which he established on the shelf behind the seats. Besides looking very impressive back there, it held a lot of gas and helped to hold down the rear end of the car.
Over the Ford radiator the tinsmith also placed a pressed tin shell which fitted very snugly and concealed the lowly identity of the car. It was a Blitzen Benz or an His-pano-Suiza until you lifted up the hood and saw the little four-cylinder motor beneath.
While Johnny was engaged upon these mysterious operations Mary was busy with a can of acid and a scraper removing the black paint. The paint on a flivver is there to stay; if you paint over it, the original black will shine through sooner or later. You’ve got to get right down to the tin and paint up.
The two didn’t get in each other’s way much; Johnny was underneath a good part of the time and he didn’t appear to be aware of Mary’s presence except when she dripped paint in his eye or stepped on his neck.
The whole neighborhood was startled the afternoon Johnny took the muffler off.
“Pretty?” inquired Johnny with a beatific expression upon his countenance and his ear cocked to the shattering stream of explosions.
Mary, who had never before heard a Ford engine with its muffler off, was a little astonished at its deep-voiced roar but she agreed that it was lovely.
“Wait till I get her tuned up,” Johnny promised.
Those afternoons in the back yard were joyful ones for Mary-Louise. She loved this working association with Johnny and she came to know a great deal about an automobile. She could tell you (for Johnny explained to her) exactly what happened to a drop of gasoline from the moment it entered the tank until it was blown out the exhaust pipe. She knew how it was vaporized, exploded, expelled.
She could tell the intake from the exhaust valves, the oil from the water line. She knew what a manifold was and a piston ring and a clutch plate. She learned carburetion and ignition and she could trace the cooling and lubricating systems, knowledge that was native to Johnny. And Johnny had promised to teach her to drive when the car was ready.
Mary was secretly sorry when she saw the great work coming to an end. It would mean no more afternoons in the back yard with Johnny but, she hoped, there would be others out on the open road.
Mary thought there ought to be some kind of christening ceremony the day they launched the Shooting Star — at least Mary called it the Shooting Star and she painted one, a red one with a flaming yellow tail, on the bonnet.
“Why the shooting star?” Johnny inquired.
“Well,” Mary replied hesitantly, “it looks like a shooting star and anyway have you never heard the saying about a shooting star?”
“Nope. What is it?”
“Well,” began Mary shyly, “well, the saying is … when you see a shooting star — you can kiss the girl you love.” She bent her head down on the other side of the hood, blushing furiously.
“Maybe I will,” replied Johnny, a vision of a blonde head and a pale upturned face appearing before his eyes.
Poor Mary. The color died out of her cheeks.
She didn’t mention the christening ceremony to Johnny because he might laugh, and it hurt Mary to have Johnny laugh at her fancies. But she nursed her anticipation for the great moment when the Shooting Star would be ready and Johnny would tell her to climb in and away they’d go. He hadn’t said anything about the exact time of the maiden trip but Mary expected it would be Saturday afternoon when the paint was set. There it was now, crouching in Johnny’s back yard, all aflame with new color, raring to go.
But Johnny Powell did not take Mary for the maiden excursion in the Shooting Star.
On Friday afternoon she went to tea with Caroline Hotchkiss and on the way home she saw a canary colored roadster flash down Grove Street. It was the Shooting Star. Johnny was at the wheel and beside him a girl.
Mary halted, stricken with dismay. The first time out! The maiden trip! And he had taken someone else. Oh, Johnny, Johnny. Tears sprang to her eyes. Tears of disappointment, of humiliation, of hurt pride. Johnny had taken another girl for the first ride. She stumbled home and fled upstairs to her room.
Johnny had never said anything about the exact hour when he would take the car out or that he intended to take her out first. But you would naturally expect that he would take her, wouldn’t you?
Mary had only just caught a glimpse of the girl but she knew it was Sylvia Lewis, the girl that everybody said Johnny was crazy about. Nobody knew why Sylvia had chosen to come to the quiet little western college when she might have gone anywhere to school. On account of her health, someone said.
She lived in the east, Baltimore, or somewhere, and she came from a wealthy family. At least she dressed and talked as if she did. She had a clipped, aristocratic accent and a superior manner. She had a slender, drooping figure and a pale skin and gray eyes and a way of looking at you. And she was a blonde, an eye-widening, breath-taking blonde.
During the college term she lived at the Kappa house, just across the street from the Sigma Chi’s where Johnny belonged. Why did boys always fall for a girl like that? *
When Johnny had gone to get Sylvia in the Shooting Star, he had found her dallying dreamily with Dave Armstrong on the Kappa porch-swing, whereupon, in his characteristic manner, he had seized her by the hand and torn her from his side. Further, and to insure Sylvia’s person being properly cushioned upon the hare seat of the car, Johnny seized upon the ear of pillow peeping out from under Mr. David Armstrong, and gave it a healthy jerk, precipitating Mr. David Armstrong upon the floor.
From that vantage David observed Johnny Powell bestow Sylvia gallantly into his new car and whisk her away.
There was practically nothing in this entire procedure calculated to enhance John Powell’s stature in the eyes of David Armstrong. But as he lifted himself off the floor and dusted off his white trousers he was able to smile at the impudence of the deed.
Armstrong was like that. He could smile because he felt the security of his own position with Sylvia. And anyway what Johnny had just done was the sort of feat that Armstrong himself could never bring himself to accomplish. The son of elderly, wealthy parents in Temple, he had been reared in an atmosphere of gentle manners and well-bred restraint. He lacked Johnny’s mad impetuosity.
Johnny Powell, however, interpreted David’s natural reserve as a sense of superiority and a consciousness of money. Armstrong’s appearance heightened this impression; he was tall, well-poised and had a certain grave assurance of manner.
Anyone, except perhaps Johnny Powell, could see that the tender Sylvia was more likely to respond to Armstrong’s thoughtful nature than to Johnny’s dash.
However, none could tell Johnny that, least of all, Mary. But it was the first of the heartbreaks for Mary. Still, her nature was utterly without vindictiveness, and when she heard Johnny hallooing in the back yard later in the afternoon she came down.
“Take a little ride?”
“I’d love to,” she said brightly and she managed to smile when she climbed in.
The Shooting Star became famous in Temple and environs. Ladies with perambulators stopped and clucked their tongues; elderly gentlemen halted on street corners and wagged their heads, and small boys whooped when Johnny flashed past.
He even became the veiled subject of a darkly prophetic editorial in the Temple Vidette. An editorial directed at rich men’s sons and their high-powered motor-cars. The fact that Johnny’s father was not rich, or that his car was a flivver, had nothing to do with the conclusion that the younger generation was headed for trouble at a hell of a clip. Johnny was viewed with alarm on all sides.
He became “that boy with the yellow racer.”
He was the “speed merchant” of Temple and was rumored to burn up the roads in and about the quiet community. In short, he became “Speed” Powell.
Rumors of these developments reached his father but his father knew the “high-powered” car for a dressed-up flivver. Besides, the car was Johnny’s own; he had spent many weeks and all of his pocket money on it. As long as he had no accidents, broke no laws and didn’t keep it out unreasonably late, the professor, a fair-minded man, saw no occasion to interfere. He would have preferred, all the same, that Johnny didn’t have the car, but since it was a fait accompli he did not protest. Certainly the Shooting Star hadn’t improved Johnny’s scholarship standing at the University.
Eight thousand miles away from the little college town where John Powell went his blonde-headed, blue-eyed way, two gentlemen were exchanging greetings.
The two gentlemen were three thousand meters in the air and bound in opposite directions. One was headed over the French lines for the purpose of making a military reconnaissance. The other was bent on a similar mission over the German lines. Passing, they saluted each other as befitted two officers engaged upon the most perilous pastime of the day: flying. Morituri morituros salutant.
But on the following day at the same hour, the one about to die did not salute the other about to die. Instead he drew his service revolver and took a pot-shot at the French pilot.
Up till this moment it had been generally agreed that flying was of itself a danger-ous enough business without adding to its perils. To take up one of those early, treacherous, unstable craft and keep it in the air was considered precarious enough. The recoil of a gun, it was thought, or the weight of a bomb would be sufficient to upset the delicate balance of the ship.
But with this pot-shot, courtesy ended. The next day the Frenchman came up with a rifle. The German brought up his own gunner — with an automatic shot-gun. Soon they were potting at each other with machine guns. The war in the air was on.
That first pot-shot was to affect the career of the blue-eyed stripling in the western college town eight thousand miles away. For Johnny Powell heard the whir of wings. The sound was destined to grow in his ears.
Accounts of the exploits of the airmen filtered into the town from time to time. There was Navarre, the smooth-faced French youth with fourteen planes to his credit; there was Guynemer, ace of aces, the twenty-year old pilot with the “face of a girl and the heart of a Frenchman.” There was Captain Ball, of the Royal Air Force, who fought the German super-hawk, Immelman, in a prearranged duel in full sight of the lines. There was Captain Boelke and Baron von Richthofen, of the Imperial Flying Corps, Victor Chapman, Norman Prince, Raoul Lufberry, Kiffin Rockwell, of the Lafayette Escadrille.
Johnny Powell read every scrap of news about these super-airmen. He knew the legends current about them, their histories, their methods of attack. He knew, for instance, that Immelman swooped down on his prey from a great height, shooting as he passed and that he never returned to attack if the enemy plane were not brought down.
Navarre dashed straight for his enemy, circled him and worried him with disconcerting fire. And he always pursued his enemy if he fled, buzzing over and above him like an angry wasp, his machine gun popping.
Guynemer, of course, had the quickest eye of them all; he had brought down three German fliers in 150 seconds, the greatest military feat ever performed in the air. He used every form of attack, straight firing from the enemy’s level, the deadly surprise dash from behind a cloud bank, the hawk-like swoop from above.
But it was all pretty remote.
Then in March of 1917, German U-boats sunk the Vigilancia, the City of Memphis, the Illinois, the Healdton, four American ships, and torpedoed the American freighter Aztec and the war was brought to Johnny’s doorstep.
On April 2, 1917, the President, at eight in the evening, in the Capitol at Washington, told a tense Congress that:
“With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical step I am taking … I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the Government and People of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent that has been thrust upon it....”
The next day everything was changed.
Overnight the campus took a new complexion. They gathered in excited knots on the steps, in the hallways, along the walks. The air was vibrant with sensation. Lectures became pallid and commonplace. The business of going to school had become, of a minute, intolerably humdrum and workaday.
They scattered quickly enough; to the Coast Artillery, to the Officers’ Training Camps, to the Naval Training Stations, to the Quartermaster Corps, to the Ambulance Sections. To the Presidio, to Camp Lewis, to Bremerton, to Allentown. The idea was to get into it right now. Classes tapered down to slender groups. The chemistry profs hurried away. The President was called to a Safety Council.
The hell of it was, Johnny Powell was only eighteen. He couldn’t get into an officers’ training camp. He couldn’t get into anything — unless he lied about his age.
Everybody told him to stick. What the hell, he was too young — wait awhile.
His father said he wasn’t to do anything at all. He was to keep right on with his education and when the time came he would be all the better equipped for whatever service he should be called to.
“Promise me, son,” his mother said, with tears standing in her eyes, “that you won’t do anything.” And Johnny said he wouldn’t.
He stood it pretty well for a while, what with everybody patting him on the back and telling him it took more courage to stick than to fly off at the first note of the bugle.
But one morning his eye caught an item in the paper that made his heart bounce. Not a large item, but one that was to change the direction of his life; it was an announcement of the opening of an examining station in Seattle for candidates for the American Air Service. Johnny went out of the house with his eyes shining.
Mary saw him cranking up the car.
“Where you going?”
“Oh, just for a little ride,” said Johnny cautiously.
“Take me?”
He studied her for a second. “All right, jump in.”
She never knew Johnny to drive so swiftly or so well. It was supreme pleasure just to ride with him, so effortlessly did he handle the yellow roadster. They went skimming along, bare-headed, shirt-sleeved in the open car in the morning sun, slipping by everyone on the road, Mary’s dress ballooning in the wind.
Not until they were in Seattle did Mary know where they were going. Johnny parked the car in front of the municipal building with Mary in it and said he would be gone “quite a few minutes.” Mary waited two hours.
There were two other boys from Temple in the ante-room when Johnny went in. One was Herman Schwimpf and the other was Dave Armstrong. Johnny didn’t mind Herman, he was kind of a funny-looking, harmless bird — was putting himself through college by night-work in a garage — but he did somehow resent the presence of Armstrong.
It seemed that wherever he went Armstrong was in ahead of him.
Armstrong was called first because his name began with “A.’’ Johnny learned then what he was to learn over and over again, that in this man’s army it was a great help to he near the top of the alphabet.
It made him restive to see Armstrong walk in before him hut he tried to comfort himself with the thought that maybe Armstrong wouldn’t survive the tests. They were pretty severe, he’d heard. They made you hold the points of a needle between your thumb and forefinger and then shot off a pistol unexpectedly in your ear to see if you’d flinch and draw blood. Maybe that was all bunk.
“Powell!”
“Yes, Sir.”
‘‘Step in, Powell.’’
Johnny followed the uniformed figure inside.
“Age?”
“Nineteen.”
“What do you weigh, Powell?”
“Hundred and forty-two.”
“Take off your clothes.”
“Now this,” said the doctor to his assistant, when Johnny stood stripped to the skin, “is the type of youngster we want.”
“Yes?” returned the other. “Probably has a thick ear drum or a tobacco heart or hernia or something. These likely looking ones usually have something the matter.” The examining doctor put a stethoscope to Johnny’s heart and lungs, tapped his chest and upper back with a practised forefinger, wrapped a rubber bandage around his arm and took his blood pressure, calling off to his assistant with a pad, “Normal — Normal — Normal.”
“When the chair stops spinning focus your eyes on the wall.” In vain Johnny tried to fix his swimming eyes on the wall when the chair came to rest while the doctor, his face an inch away, peered intently into them. The instant they stopped he clicked a stop-watch. “Nystagmus — to the right — normal.”
Johnny read lighted charts in a dark room with right eye and his left eye and with both eyes; he listened to a watch tick at varying distances from his ear and he balanced on one foot with his eyes closed. In other words they tested his eyes, his ears, his heart, his balance and they took specimens of his blood and water.
“That’s all, Powell. You can put your clothes on.”
Release Date: August 12, 1927
Release Time: 111 minutes(original release)
144 minutes(restoration 2012)
Director: William A. Wellman
Cast:
Clara Bow as Mary Preston
Charles "Buddy" Rogers as Jack Powell
Richard Arlen as David Armstrong
Jobyna Ralston as Sylvia Lewis
El Brendel as Herman Schwimpf
Richard Tucker as Air Commander
Gary Cooper as Cadet White
Gunboat Smith as Sergeant
Henry B. Walthall as Mr. Armstrong
Roscoe Karns as Lieutenant Cameron
Julia Swayne Gordon as Mrs. Armstrong
Arlette Marchal as Celeste
Uncredited:
George Irving as Mr. Powell
Hedda Hopper as Mrs. Powell
Evelyn Selbie as dressing room attendant
Robert Livingston as recruit in examination office
William A. Wellman as doughboy
Nigel De Brulier as French peasant
Zalla Zarana as French peasant girl
Douglas Haig as little French boy
Thomas Carrigan as aviator
Charles Barton as soldier flirting with Mary
James Pierce as military policeman
Carl von Haartman as German officer
Thomas Carr as aviator
Dick Grace as aviator
Awards:
1929 Academy Awards(the first Academy Awards)
Best Picture - Won
Best Engineering Effects - Roy J Pomeroy - Won
Trailer
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John Monk Saunders was an American novelist, screenwriter and film director. He served in the Air Service during World War I as a flight instructor in Florida, but was never able to secure a posting to France, a disappointment that frustrated him for the remainder of his life. His screenwriting credits include Wings (1927), The Legion of the Condemned (1928), The Last Flight (1931) which he adapted from his own novel Single Lady, and the documentary film Conquest of the Air (UK, 1936), which he also co-directed. He died in 1940.
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