Hollywood's Representation of Naval Aviation: Frank W. 'Spig' Wead and John Ford's The Wings of Eagles (1957)

摘要

The Wings of Eagles, a 1957 MGM film directed by John Ford, is a fictionalized history of naval aviation as seen through Hollywood and the eyes of a fabled Hollywood director, and his close friend, "Spig" Wead, a well-known screen writer and the author of such films as Hell Divers, Ceiling Zero, and Test Pilot. Wead, a 1916 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, served on a mine layer in the North Sea during World War I. In April 1920, he became a naval aviator, commanding one of the first torpedo bomber squadrons and one of the first squadrons to fly from an aircraft carrier. In 1923, he was a member of the U.S. Navy team that participated in the Schneider Trophy Race at Cowes, England. In 1926, he had a disabling accident in his home in Coronado, California, and he underwent a long and painful recuperation period, not knowing if he would ever be able to walk again. He subsequently left the Navy for Hollywood, where he became a noted script writer, befriended Ford with whom he collaborated on such films as Air Mail (1932) and They Were Expendable (1945). After Pearl Harbor, he returned to the Navy, and saw combat action during the invasion of the Marshall Islands, the attack against Truk, and the Battle of the Marianas. He was awarded the Legion of Merit in August 1944.Wings of Eagles, which stars John Wayne as Wead, and Maureen O'Hara as his wife "Min" tells the story of Wead's efforts to promote naval aviation as the "backbone of the fleet," and the "spearpoint of battle" for the Navy, both through his career as a naval officer and as a Hollywood screenwriter. As Larry Suid points out in Sailing on the Silver Screen: Hollywood and the U.S. Navy (Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1996), the film "not only showed how the carriers performed their mission, but the process by which the service had worked with the money men in Congress." (145) The film also focuses a great deal of attention on Wead's injury and his attempts to overcome his disability. This paper will attempt to deconstruct Wings of Eagles and arrive at some concrete conclusions about Wead's significance both as a screenwriter and promoter of military and civil aviation. As an important Hollywood writer who tended to specialize in aviation-related subject matter, he had some influence over public perceptions of aviation. As a former naval aviator, he was able to popularize naval aviation for a broad general audience in such films as The Flying Fleet (1929), Dirigible (1931) Hell Divers (1931), and Dive Bomber (1941). The paper will also attempt to discern if there was a generic pattern in Wead's screenwriting that emphasized elements seen in other military aviation genre films of the period; namely, characterization, values and actions, and iconography.