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Such a frustrating disappointment

best movie i've ever seen.

As Good As It Gets

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Despite this film being brought to us by Tiffany Studios, it is FAR from a high class and quality production. "Wings of Adventure" is incredibly slow, dull and full of too many story elements that just make you wonder is anyone liked this movie when it debuted.The film begins with a pilot and his completely unfunny comic relief friend having engine problems and they are forced to land their airplane. However, instead of getting back to the Army, they are soon kidnapped by Mexican rebels--sort of like Pancho Villa...except the leader seems about as Mexican as bratwurst! Soon, they are forced back to the revolutionary headquarters where absolutely nothing happens for the longest time. Sure, they eventually escape...but it seems to take forever because the film is so low energy, talky (like many of the early talking pictures) and features a leading man with the same charisma as blue cheese. By this point, this stupefyingly dull film just about made me comatose--mostly because with the word ADVENTURE in the title, you'd think it would be exciting and full of action...which is isn't! Instead, there are lots of irrelevant musical numbers and romance...very unconvincing romance at that. The bottom line is that the film is never enjoyable in the least. Heck, instead of seeing this film, you'd be better of bashing yourself in the head with a mackerel! Dull and pointless and cheap.

------SPOILER ALERT---------- This 1930 feature (reissued in 1934, mine is a reissue copy) is a weak film overall with poor musical sequences, a lack of continuity, and awful pseudo-Mexican accents from the supporting players. It begins with many soldiers getting out of their tents in the morning, singing a glee-club style song (!!!), and then looking up in the sky at two aviators, played by b-movie stalwart Rex Lease and former silent comic Clyde Cook. Their plane is forced to land, and they are ambushed by a group of Mexican bandits who also mouth some revolutionary rhetoric, but are really depicted as buffoons who act as if they are drunk (presumable this takes place near the US/Mexico border, but that is never made clear). These bandits take the two prisoner, and they meet the lovely Armida, who is also being held prisoner as she is being kept for the powerful leader, La Panthera, in whom she of course is not interested. Armida is a charming lady and her one song is the only listenable music in the film (in another scene, the bandit leader plucks a simplistic riff on a guitar that sounds like something off a Jandek album, and Clyde Cook does a comedic dance to it!!). For all but the last five minutes of the film, the (lack of) action takes place among these Mexican characters, but then in the last few minutes the Anglo soldiers are seen once again and attack the Mexicans. As the two sides fire at each other, Lease and Armida escape, and Cook crashes the plane for laughs. I love z-grade 1930s independent films, and I find early-sound films fascinating, but this one is a misfire on most counts. Lease and Cook and Armida are all talented performers who did fine work in other films and do not embarrass themselves here--director Richard Thorpe did a lot of fine work at Chesterfield in the early 30s and at various studios later well into the 1960s (he even directed Jailhouse Rock!). WINGS OF ADVENTURE is not a film they would want to be remembered by.