The Dark Adventure of the Air War

This chapter is a discussion of the production history and audience reception of William Wellman’s film Wings (1927) in the United States and United Kingdom. I argue that the movie is an example of a sub-genre of Great War cinema that I call “The Dark Adventure”—movies that could be contextualized as Hollywood action spectacle with a more serious undertone of fatalism. From the standpoint of Historical Reception Studies, audience responses, particularly those from actual veterans, are contextualized.