Douglas Sirk's 1958 adaptation of Faulkner's Pylon, The Tarnished Angels is a febrile swamp of sexual hysteria, an early example, one might argue, of "queer cinema." The erotic panic that the film portrays focuses on the geometric torso of Robert Stack who plays Roger Shumann, a former World War One ace, fallen on hard times. Stack is fidgety, a cubist robotic -- he struts around like an animated store-front mannequin, his eyes glittering in the Euclidean mask of his face. Stack barks out wild commands and makes violent threats but he seems to exist for one reason -- to expiate his sexual guilt by masochistic self-sacrifice. Stack's guilt arises from marrying a much younger woman who was in love with him -- or, rather, in love with his image as portrayed in a similarly Cubist-looking war bonds posters. (Everyone seems to have paintings by Braque or Picasso in their Cubist phase on the walls.) Stack is either homosexual or impotent and the marriage, certainly, isn't founded on any kind of mutual physical passion -- for half the film, Stack shares a bed with his mechanic, Jiggs, a burly Wallace Beery type who is also in helpless love with the dashing and tormented pilot. (It is alleged that Jiggs is the real father of the little boy who calls the pilot "daddy"; in fact, this issue arises in the opening scene in which Rock Hudson, as a journalist with the New Orleans Picayune, restrains a thug from teasing the little boy about the identity of his father -- exactly, how this piece of calumny has been broadcast to the world is uncertain, but the fact that everyone knows that Stack's demonic pilot is not the child's father suggests that Shumann's reputation for sexual irregularity is well-established and precedes him everywhere he goes.) Dorothy Malone as the spurned wife pouts and drinks herself into periodic alcoholic rages -- her schtick is to dive from Shumann's bi-plane and parachute to the earth while wearing a dress that, of course, is flipped up over her head exposing her crotch and legs as she plummets to the ground. Floating into this toxic atmosphere like a big, soft blimp, Rock Hudson falls in love head-over-heels with both the pilot and Dorothy Malone. Hudson is at his most soft-spoken and ineffectual in this film -- he's both a hysteric and a drunk: he flies into rage when his editor tells him that he needs to cover a senator who has come to town and not the flying circus at the airfield. The newsman's rage is so infantile that it is shocking -- he shrieks petulantly and pitches heaps of paper around the office. This scene is offset by a later lengthy eulogy that Hudson's journalist delivers on the death of the pilot. This speech is Shakespearian in tenor and so wildly over-the-top that it seems campy and ridiculous although some of the journalist's rhetorical devices are effective in a grandiloquent way. But the audience for this speech, supposedly hardened and cynical newsmen, are enraptured and they conclude that the journalist was right all along in battling to cover the adventures of the troupe of biplane racers -- the newsman gets his job back and a pat on the shoulder as well. (It's as if Sirk allowed the boozy, garrulous Faulkner an opportunity to stand center-stage in the film and deliver a bourbon-soaked monologue -- it's impressive and ridiculous at the same time and, more than a little bit insulting to the audience: the speech is supposed to tell us what to think about the characters but, in fact, is shown by Sirk to be just one more instance of the sexual hysteria central to the film. It's Rock Hudson's declaration of love for the surly airman.)
The Tarnished Angels is shot in wide-screen cinemascope and the images comprising the film are never less than arresting. Sirk's interiors in particular feature characters bathed in uncompromisingly clinical white light, half their faces radiant and the other half sunk in profound darkness. His sets are crowded, dense with mirrors and words plastered on walls: "THINK" in an aircraft hangar and THEFT; IS IT INTERESTING? in the crowded offices of the Picayune and the double entendre of big signs advertising fresh oysters in shots featuring Dorothy Malone. Mardi Gras is underway and Sirk avails himself of every Baroque effect imaginable, this melodramatic excess excused by the torchlight parades and masked mummers -- sinister Ensor-like figures emerge from crowds, characters wearing strange and hideous masks, and, in one scene, Death himself appears playing a ukulele to forecast the hero's demise. The film breaks into three parts, the first two punctuated by spectacular crashes -- in one, the plane smashes into the earth and explodes while the hapless pilot is hurled right at the camera, his flying body crashing into the mud a few feet in front of the lens. In the first third of the film, we are introduced to the characters -- there is a long reverie-like scene that takes place in Rock Hudson's bachelor apartment, a room inside a vast decaying mansion with Escher-like stairs that make no geometric sense descending curved walls on which the balustrade casts an enormous shadow. This space is full of half-moon or rising sun transoms and features spooky, noisy neighbors who assess with disapprobation the troupe of flyers invited to bunk with the journalist. This is the scene where Jiggs and Robert Stack sleep together while Dorothy Malone undresses and tries to seduce the soft and feckless Rock Hudson. The first third of the picture is dreamlike, Faulknerian in its invocation of faded Southern elegance. The second third of the picture features the airplanes racing around pylons. When Shumann's plane is disabled, the pilot sends her wife to prostitute herself to a wealthy man (who has earlier made a pass at her) so that he will loan his aircraft to them for the race on the morrow. Rock Hudson instead goes to the rich man and persuades him to allow the plane, which is disabled anyway, to fly in the next day's race. In that race, the plane crashes and Shumann is lost. Curiously, the film doesn't end with Shumann's death and, in fact, all the real (and somewhat surreal) fireworks occur in the last third of the movie. A banquet is held for the survivors of the Lafayette Escadrille and themes of Shumann's degradation into a kind of flying billboard, an advertisement for his sponsors, are raised again; we know Shumann to be suffering from what we would call today post-traumatic stress disorder -- he can't sleep and imagines himself being burned to death in his plane. The journalist confronts his fellow newsmen and renders his high-flown apologia for Robert Stack's bad behavior. The rich man tries to buy Dorothy Malone but Rock Hudson intervenes. (It's shocking to modern sensibilities that the adult characters, more or less, abandon the grieving little boy to his own devices while the wallow in their own alcohol-drenched misery.) Rock Hudson doesn't get the girl exactly -- it's pretty clear that he is gay as well and everyone has been reading Willa Cather's My Antonia, a sure tip-off, I think. Hudson tells Malone that he wants her to return the book to him and she flies off with her little boy, planning to reestablish herself amidst the virtues of simple Midwest. This is a fascinating film, so congested with themes and subtexts that the movie threatens to explode like the fragile planes whirling dizzily past the pylons, great erections stuck in the sand, obelisks that the aircraft are said "to kiss" as they turn close to them.
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