Click here for the review of Wings (1927)

Best Picture winner at the 1929 Oscars.

Wait...what was the Howard Hughes plane movie?

No, that was 1930's Hell's Angels:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020960/

Two brothers attending Oxford enlist with the RAF when World War I breaks out. Roy and Monte Rutledge have very different personalities. Monte is a freewheeling womanizer, even with his brother's girlfriend Helen. He also proves to have a yellow streak when it comes to his Night Patrol duties. Roy is made of strong moral fiber and attempts to keep his brother in line. Both volunteer for an extremely risky two man bombing mission for different reasons. Monte wants to lose his cowardly reputation and Roy seeks to protect his brother. Their assignment to knock out a strategic German munitions facility is a booming success, but with a squadron of fighters bearing down on them afterwards, escape seems unlikely.

This is a film that I've seen three or four times and it stands up very well; even better if you're into the style of old films and interested in how they did things. One of my favorite moments is when the pilots are flying overhead and an excited Clara Bow is leaping up and down waving them on. And a lot of things you are looking at, like the bombardments are the real deal. The climax is pretty powerful because you've come to know these people.

Hollywood did a good job at it's first Oscars. Wings and Sunrise deserved their awards, as did Emil Janning and Janet Gaynor (each for multiple films). My only quarrel is with director, which should have gone to Murnau. Sunrise's award was for "artistic production," which is fitting because it's much more of an artistic picture while Wings is more of an epic entertainment.

Hell's Angels has a lot of great scenes including German soldiers jumping out of a Zeppelin to help it gain height, realistic dogfights, and a powerful climax, not to mention a terrible Jean Harlow performance from the days before she learned to act. (Although she's even worse in The Public Enemy, where she acts like she just had a prefrontal lobotomy. About the time of Beast of the City, she started taking acting more seriously, took acting lessons, and was often good, especially in comedies. She's great in Red Dust, for instance.)

The curious thing about Hell's Angels is that it was in the can as a silent film around the time that the talkies began debuting in theaters. Hughes decided he wanted to be on the cutting edge, so he basically threw out the original and re-made it as a sound film. I believe he took a huge financial bath on it. It is a pretty decent movie, though.

nice review, but I think 'Wild Bill' Wellman is better known today for directing Public Enemy than for this or A Star Is Born.