In 1942, James Stewart called on young people to serve in aviation or “Eagles learn to fly”! James Stewart's last pre-war film, the musical The Siegfield Girls, was released on April 25, 1941. And a month earlier, on March 22, the actor (preliminarily terminating his contract with MGM studio) was enlisted as a private in the US Army. Due to his long-standing passion for airplanes and the availability of a professional pilot license ( by the early 40s he flew about 400 hours!), Stuart chose to serve in aviation.
But his star status initially prevented him from obtaining permission to travel to Europe, where military action was already taking place. So, for the first couple of years, Stewart trained pilots at air bases in California and New Mexico and took part in several military propaganda short films.
One of these works was 18-minute film"Winning Your Wings" (1942), filmed by directors John Houston and Owen Crump at the studio Warner Bros. The film was created in order to attract the attention of young people to the service in the Air Force, which is how they wanted to attract at least 100,000 volunteers to their ranks (I do not know why this figure is). As the future showed, the production of Houston and Krump successfully coped with this task - the number of those wishing to serve in aviation exceeded 150 thousand!
I don’t want to say much about the plot of Winning Your Wings. In fact, everything is simple here: James Stewart (for the most part, as "voice-by-camera", although he appears briefly in the frame) will tell the audience about all kinds of existing (and even non-existing) "bonuses", which are waiting for young guys who chose to serve in the Air Force during the war. And all this against the background of the shots that were designed to visually demonstrate the youth in 1942 these very "bonuses".
Whether "...Wings" was nominated for the "Oscar" award in the nomination "Best Documentary", I should be left to judge by other specialists (because I myself, frankly, in the genre of documentary film, almost at all, as they say, "neither foot"). So, for now, I will just limit myself to expressing my observations about this short film.
And I saw personally in the person of "...Wings" is not the most interesting movie agitation, which even the fact of involvement in its creation James Stewart and John Houston is not particularly saving (although it is possible that at the time of release the film looked different than in our days). I do not think that there is any sense in a detailed analysis of this creation, but there are still two positive aspects that allow me not to cross it out completely, as "failure", in it.
First, there are episodes that show the flights themselves, as well as the operation of air bases, where potential pilots were to serve. Well, and secondly, I must admit that James Stewart in <...Wings was so inspiring in the shot about aviation that at times I myself wanted to sign up.
In conclusion, it remains to state that "Winning Your Wings" is nothing more than an ordinary and unremarkable advertising and documentary short, attracting the attention of the audience today only by the fact that it was worked on John Houston and James Stewart. But nothing more.
P. S. In November 1943, Stuart's desire to take part in hostilities was finally realized (after being sent to Tiebenham Base in Northern England). The actor will finish the war in 1945 with the rank of colonel and many awards, which made him one of the few Americans who have advanced so far in the military “table of ranks” in just four years.
However, Stuart himself did not like to recall this part of his biography, as a result of which he almost always avoided participating in military films (making an exception only a couple of times for his entire subsequent film career) and categorically refused to discuss his life during the war with the press. As for the "big movie", his first notable post-war work in Hollywood was the film "Frank Capra" "This Wonderful Life" (1946). This is a completely different story!
5 out of 10