The broadway Melody(1929)

This is the first musical comedy elected as Best Movie for Oscar. And we have to say it is not too bad.

First, as it is a musical comedy, this movie is a speaking one, which is also the first speaking one winning Oscar. We find there some key features which are now on the common imaginaire of musical comedy : the singings, the yellow yellow-hat and stick, the "french cancan" and the inclusion of theater-scene inside the movie.
The story is mainly about love (again !) between various people which love or not each other and say the contrary (to summarise).
Nothing exceptionnal here, but nothing really bad neider, it would be interesting to watch the other movie of this year to compare the quality of the production.
We may note that electing a comedy just before the 1929 crisis may denote a lack of vision from the Academy, or exactly the contrary...

Wings - 1927

During the 20's the cinema has finished his mutation, and Hollywood place itself has the main actor in worlwide cinema.
After the world war 1 and before the black thursday (1929) the time was to euphoria. It is an era of full ingineering creativity : telephon, phonograph, radio, TV are on their ways. Hollywood conquered the world and put in place the basis of the star system, which lead to the creation of Awards in 1929. On May 16, 1929 was delivered the first 'Best Picture Award' for “Wings” of William A. Wellman.
This movie is a real action / war movie as the cinema will produce for years after. It is a silent movie, dedicated to the flyers army guys of the worl war 1. As it has to be for a great story, this movie is about love, love of Mary loving Jack, himself loving Sylvia who loves David... David and Jack finally go together to fight on planes against german, become friends, die, etc...
It is interesting to see how some classics scenes are already contained on this 80-years old movie :

• We see references to "The general" (Buster Keaton, 1926) on the way the guys are applying to army
• We have the feeling to see Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" (1987) army-instructor's hat
• We are surprised to laugh again on the old sketch "now the boot is on the other foot!" from brothers Lumiere:
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• And in some point we also think about the first version of Microsoft Flight Similator

That is to say how full of potential references is this movie, with great special effects for this time, on which we are trully embarqued inside the plane fights : we see the bombs dropped from planes, the pilots shooting one to each other, the planes crashing down on the ground, and there is also some champagne buble which escape from bottle to fly straight in the air...
This movie bring action, love, comic, tragedy to us.
It is well fulfilled and desserve to be seen still today !