“Wings is one of the most excitingly directed war pictures of any period. Spectaculars have frequently attempted the same subject, but Wings, staged on an awesome scale, remains supreme. The story and the characterizations (a love triangle involving Clara Bow, Charles Rogers and Richard Arlen) have not received the care and skill lavished on the action; this is primarily an action picture, and death and destruction have seldom been more lyrically and sweepingly portrayed. The camera is in an aircraft for the most memorable scenes; the audience is given the vicarious thrill of shooting down balloons, engaging the enemy in a dogfight, bombing a village.... Normally such scenes are carefully staged within a confined area... but Wellman (himself a flier in the First World War) has half Texas and a whole army to play with....” --Kevin Brownlow.

Wings was a film of firsts: the first Oscar for Best Picture; the first big boom shot, across a Paris night club (“Then everybody got on a boom, and me and Jack Ford got right off”). Penelope Gilliatt wrote, on the film's revival in 1971, “One forgets, maybe, how many of the things in this key silent, which is a flag-waver but innocently unrecriminative about Germans, were happening for the first time. How often had people seen shots like these of the shadows of airplanes travelling over the ground? How many people then had even flown? How many people knew what clouds looked like from above? The excitement must have been terrific.”