Nonureva Really Surprised!

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

DKosty123 With John Wayne, John Ford, Dan Dailey, and Maureen O'Hara involved in a true life story of a friend, you expect a perfect film here. What happens though is an interesting film, but not a great one. John Wayne plays a person who is looked upon as a hero, and give the film credit, it shows that he had many flaws. This film, which followed the classic The Searchers, just does not get to that level.There is more honesty in this one than you'd expect. Wayne actually for one of the few times in his career, works without his toupee. While the story of Wead is inspirational, he comes back from a major fall and neck injury, his life is a mix which is accurately depicted here.Wead appears to love his wife and children, but alt of most always throws them aside for his love of aviation, the Navy, and his own writing and partying. His priorities are way out of whack, yet he somehow keeps going and then recovers in a miracle from near paralysis. Maureen O'Hara only gets a few good scenes in this one as his wife.The interesting thing to Wead is that even after this miracle, he still does not appear to have learned any lesson about change. His priorities stay out of whack and he never seems to get a personal life with goals that make sense.Wayne is not comfortable playing Wead, and Ford though accurate with the main character, appears not to get a lot of the fine detail work of events behind the Biopic accurate. After The Searchers, this is truly a let down.Still, it is a movie which needed to be made because I have to admit everyone involved resisted the urge to make Wead a God to be worshiped. He obviously wasn't and you suspect after viewing it that his personal live might have gotten some white washing still. In that way, this film has a quality a lot of biopics being made in the 1950's do not. Even when he recovers and moves his left toe, they don't make it a message from God.Dan Dailey getting to do a song is a rare bonus here. Wayne does an excellent job with showing the physical problems with Wead, even after his left toe recovers. This does stick out as a unique enough effort that it is worth a look. We only wish it were more.

MartinHafer The fact that I called this film "Dopey" isn't exactly a slam against the movie--really. It's more a reference to the light and silly spirit of the first half of the film where John Wayne and Dan Dailey act a little more like frat boys than navy fliers. This aspect of the movie was not my favorite part, I admit, but it was still a lot of fun. Once 'Spig' Wead (Wayne) is nearly killed in an accident and is so badly hurt that his flying days are over, the movie seemed a lot more like a real-life version of the life of this actual person who served in the US Navy and was a consultant to Hollywood. However, the only negative I have is about Wead's life. If his marital difficulties were as they were described in the movie, it was a bit of a downer and made connecting to his character a little difficult for me. While he was a brave and dedicated man, any guy who'd give up his wife that easily seems nuts. Plus, it just seemed wrong for Wayne and O'Hara NOT to be together. Too bad they couldn't, for once, change his life to make a better movie (after all, they did this in Errol Flynn movies all the time!).

artbeads I just caught this on TCM. It's a stretch in acting for Wayne, I think. He rarely did characters with flaws, either physical or mental.But he does a great job.Did anyone catch a wonderful comment made by Wayne while he and the naval staff were watching films of the carriers being bombed? Wayne is commenting that the solution to the Navy's problem is obvious, but it is eluding him. There is some banter about how to get your thinking going when it's at a standstill. That is, how to get into action when things seem unworkable. Wayne comments, "In Hollywood we'd stop and look around and here's the 7th cavalry coming." All things considered, I thought it a great comment!

Ben Burgraff (cariart) If John Ford hadn't made THE WINGS OF EAGLES, Commander Frank W. 'Spig' Wead would be best known today for the impressive collection of military-oriented stories he wrote for motion pictures, during the 30s and 40s. Among his credits are HELL DIVERS (with Wallace Beery and Clark Gable), TEST PILOT (with Gable and Spencer Tracy), DIVE BOMBER (with Errol Flynn and Fred MacMurray), and THEY WERE EXPENDABLE (for John Ford, with John Wayne and Robert Montgomery). He brought to his writing a love of flying, pride in the military, and an understanding that a 'greater good' must sometimes take precedence over personal happiness.In THE WINGS OF EAGLES, director Ford illustrates how Wead's life was every bit as interesting and dramatic as anything he wrote. A close personal friend (so much so that he even cast Ward Bond to play a thinly-disguised version of himself, named 'John Dodge', in the film), Ford was witness to many of the triumphs and tragedies of the pioneer Naval aviator/engineer's life. After completing THE SEARCHERS, Ford commemorated the tenth anniversary of his friend's passing with this sensitive, 'warts-and-all' tribute.Wead (portrayed by John Wayne, in one of his most fully realized characterizations...he even sacrificed his hairpiece, as the older Wead, for the sake of authenticity), begins the film as a typical hell-raising Ford hero, a Navy flier who loved taunting his Army counterparts (led by the terrific Kenneth Tobey), lived for the sheer joy of flying bi-planes (even when he was clueless as to HOW to fly them), and had the love of a feisty yet devoted woman (Maureen O'Hara, of course!) But, in keeping with the tone of much of the older Ford's work, Wead's life does not tie itself up into a neat, happy package, but develops into a complex near-tragedy of a man so consumed with his career that his marriage breaks down, and has his greatest dream snatched away from him when an accident cripples him. Rather than falling back on the potential aid a wife could provide, he refuses her help, relying on his Navy 'family' (represented by Dan Dailey, in one of his most popular roles) for rehabilitation. With Pearl Harbor, Wead's expertise is again called upon, and he leaves a successful career as a screenwriter to rejoin the Navy, becoming the innovator of jeep carriers...only to see his health fail him, yet again, forcing him out of the service he loved. It is a story both sad and moving, and Wayne, so often accused of being 'bigger than life' and one-dimensional in his portrayals, again demonstrates his underrated acting talent, capturing the frustration of a man who never truly achieves the ultimate triumphs he dreams of. Wead is a 'real' person, not always likable, but someone you learn to admire for his sheer determination to contribute, and not surrender to self-pity.With an excellent supporting cast (particularly Ken Curtis, as Wead's lifelong friend, John Dale Price), THE WINGS OF EAGLES may disappoint someone looking for a 'typical' war movie, but, as a film biography, is far more honest than Hollywood's 'usual' hokum. 'Spig' Wead would have loved it!