MOVIE CLASSICS:Men with Wings (William A. Wellman, 1938)

I’M going to take a break from posting about Wellman after this one and turn to other directors for a while… but first just wanted to say something about his movie focusing on aviation pioneers, Men with Wings, which stars Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland and Louise Campbell. Sadly this is another one of his that hardly anybody gets the chance to see, though it is hard to know quite why it has fallen into such obscurity. Made the year after A Star Is Born and Nothing Sacred, it was another lavish early Technicolor production – but, where both of those famous films are available on a host of public domain DVDs and now also in properly restored prints on Blu-ray and DVD, Men with Wings has almost disappeared. I know it was recently shown during the Wellman festival at the Film Forum in New York, but I believe it is rarely if ever shown on TV, and it is only available to buy on bootleg DVDs, possibly of varying quality – the one I bought is fairly ropey, with badly washed out colour and a lot of noise on the soundtrack. But someone has posted the first 20 minutes or so on Youtube in a much more watchable print, where you can get a sense of what the colour should be like. Maybe the problem with its availability is that it was made by Paramount rather than Selznick’s company.

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MOVIE CLASSICS:Men with Wings (William A. Wellman, 1938)