Tarnished Angels

“Tarnished Angels (1957)” was the last of eight films made by director Douglas Sirk with Rock Hudson.  The movie is about a troupe of barnstorming pilots in 1930, men who raise small planes at rural air shows and county fairs for prize-money The picture, an adaptation of a problematic late Faulkner novel, “Pylon,” was universally derided by American critics when the movie was first released.  After Fassbinder, and the New German Cinema, Sirk’s Hollywood melodramas assumed an importance in film history -- Fassbinder and his cohorts admired those pictures and claimed them as inspirations and so critics took another look.  Perhaps, not surprisingly, critics now find merits, and even a kind of tawdry greatness,in Sirk’s films, particularly “Written on the Wind,” “Imitation of Life,” and “All that Heaven Allows,” qualities that were not visible in the Eisenhower era when the movies were made.  “Tarnished Angels” was admired from the start by European critics and it is easy to see why:  shot in velvety and expressive black and white, the huge cinemascope compositions are exquisitely designed, the set decoration is lush with symbolic bric-a-brac and various Freudian emblems, and the film’s plot is curiously muted, complex, and angst-ridden.  Images of empty runways, squalid carnivals and cafes, and loudspeakers raised like the banners of a disreputable metal army over the desolate airstrip -- these shots have some of the existential ambience of Antonioni’s films from the early sixties.  Sirk began as an expressionist (in Germany, he was known as Detlev Sierck)  and he freights the film with omens and portents -- a bacchanalian Mardi Gras orgy is always underway in the next corridor or down the street from the place where the characters are bickering and, from time to time, masked figures make sinister entrances:  skulls and devils abound and there is a huge papier-mache figure, a vast head expressing appalled horror shown in close-up from time-to-time.  At the airshow, a man wearing a hideous mask wanders around, apparently, unnoticed by everyone else and when the hero crashes and drowns in Lake Pontchartrain, the masked figure restrains the man’s widow played by Dorothy Malone -- the monster is wearing a little fez.  In one scene, the camera tracks back away from men carrying the coffin of a airman who has perished to glide across an alley and pass by a car where a man and women dressed in harlequin costumes are necking.  Sirk’s staging and camera movements are complex, even Baroque -- in one shot, Sirk drags his camera through a sort of oculus, a kind of eye in the transom of a door, tracking Rock Hudson as the lovelorn journalist, as the movie star ascends stairs (a pointlessly huge and grandiose flight of steps), then, passing through a dark room where the heroic pilot and his mechanic Jigs are sleeping, apparently in the same bed, tracking over a little boy curled up on the floor and, then, emerging in a bright room where Dorothy Malone is seen through what seems like an open door, boozing, of course -- everyone in this film drinks continuously.  The uninterrupted shot follows Rock Hudson through the door under the oculus in the transom and, then, we discover, to our surprise, that Dorothy Malone is, in fact, not where we thought that she was -- we saw her initially in a mirror.  At least three times, Sirk readjusts his spaces showing Malone in a room and, then, moving the camera to show that she is really behind us and that the bright zone in which we saw her approach or recline or just stare baffled into space was, in fact, a mirror.  The formal surprises that Sirk engineers in his mise-en-scene correlate to a bizarre plot that seems to have its emphases and big scenes in all the wrong places.  Robert Stack is a daredevil pilot married to Dorothy Malone, a woman who worships him but whom he disdains -- he married her after rolling dice for her with Jigs, a man reputed to be the father of Malone’s son.  When Stack’s plane is wrecked in a race that kills another pilot -- there is a spectacular crash with the corpse of the other pilot flung like a ragdoll right at the camera -- the daredevil orders Malone to go to a rival, seduce him, and, thereby, entice the businessman to loan his airplane to Stack.  Rock Hudson stands-in for the young Faulkner.  He plays the part of a reporter who observes Robert Stack’s callous behavior toward his beautiful and submissive wife, falls in love with the woman, and tries to persuade her to leave the brutal pilot, a former WWI ace said to “have motor-oil in his veins” instead of blood.  Hudson goes himself to the businessman, a crass fellow who is using the airplanes as a kind of “winged billboard” for his earthmoving equipment.  He persuades the man to allow Robert Stack to fly the plane in the race on the morrow.  In that race, the plane’s engine fails and to avoid crashing into the crowd at the air-show, Stack dives the monoplane into the lake and is killed.  (With a kind of sledgehammer Teutonic gravity, Sirk intercuts the race around the pylons with the pilot’s young boy observing the catastrophe while trapped on a carnival ride, small planes rotating around a column like a merry-go-round.  At this point, the perverse plot becomes even more peculiar.  The crash into the lake is not the film’s climax.  Rather, there is an extended last act in which the significance of the daredevil pilot’s death is considered.  The men in the story all vie for Dorothy Malone’s affections --- she is the weakest link in the film, overly histrionic, and very hard-looking, her breasts funneled to spearpoints and her blonde hair seeming more than a little weary, her features ice-cold and embittered in close-up.  The movie stalls out in a long oration by Rock Hudson about the nobility of the dead pilot -- this is alcohol-drenched Faulkner-style discourse at its most bombastic.  But you have to admire Sirk’s nerve in bringing the film to a dead stop so that Rock Hudson, three-sheets to the wind, can emote about the poor, lost airman.  After more drinking and a melodramatic confrontation between the amorous businessman and Hudson, the film lurches to a tentatively happy ending -- somewhere over the rainbow, Rock and Dorothy will get together again and consummate their aborted love affair.   The movie isn’t great, but it’s memorable.  And the early sequences of the little entourage of pilot, Jigs, the mechanic, wife and son have a grim melancholy force.  Stack seems to be impotent or homosexual and his distaste for his young wife is hard to grasp -- hence, Rock Hudson’s orotund eulogy toward the end of the movie, an attempt to make sense out of what otherwise is difficult to construe.  Dorothy Malone’s hardness and faded looks are cruelly appropriate to the film and the elaborate staging and complex camera movements, as well as the movie’s casual perversity and stoic indifference to suffering, were to be influential fifteen years later in Fassbinder’s reinvention of the Hollywood melodrama in Munich.