The Tarnished Angels (1958) - film review

During the Great Depression, Roger Shumann earns a modest living as a barnstorming flier at provincial air shows across America, with his wife Laverne performing daring parachute stunts.  Shumann, an ace fighter pilot in WWI, is worshipped by his nine-year-old son, Jack, but has an uneasy relationship with Jiggs, his mechanic and best friend.  When the troupe comes to New Orleans, reporter Burke Devlin is fascinated by the Shumanns and their hobo way of life, although he disapproves of the off-hand way in which Shumann treats his wife and son.  In an air race contest, Shumann collides with another pilot and crash-lands his plane.  Despite this close brush with death, Shumann insists on re-entering the tournament the next day and asks the wealthy businessman Matt Ord to lend him another plane.  Ord at first refuses but yields when Devlin tells him that the positive publicity will outweigh the risk.  Jiggs insists that the plane is too dangerous to fly but Shumann will not be deterred.  He tells Laverne that this will be his last competition.  He is right...

The Tarnished Angels is arguably the bleakest and most personal of Douglas Sirk’s great Hollywood melodramas.  Based on William Faulkner’s semi-autobiographical novel Pylon, it fully embraces the central Sirkian themes of identity, individuality and failure and has many striking similarities with the director’s earlier Written on the Wind (1956).  Sirk had wanted to make the film in the 1930s when he was working at UFA but his proposal was flatly rejected at the time.

Even though producer Albert Zugsmith was keen to make an adaptation of Faulkner’s novel, the bosses at Universal didn’t have sufficient faith in the project to stump up the money for it to be made in colour, so it was shot in black-and-white CinemaScope.  This actually helps the film, the stark, almost film noir-style monochrome photography emphasising the depression era gloom and lending an aura of hopeless fatalism that is reminiscent of 1930s French poetic realism.  In contrast to Sirk’s lurid colour films, which can appear distractingly stylised and over-burdened with symbolism, this film has a simplicity and hard-edged realism that bolster its dramatic impact, making the story much more compelling and poignant.  

Whilst the screenplay may have a few niggling imperfections, the principal characters are well-drawn and convincingly portrayed by Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone and Rock Hudson, who, interestingly, had all starred in Written on the Wind.   These three protagonists are the kind that recur in Sirk’s films, flawed individualists who appear incapable of making anything of their lives.  Each is an outsider who is doomed never to find success and happiness, each depends on something harmful and insubstantial to make life endurable.  Enigmatically, Sirk described the film as a study in the heroism of failure.

The Tarnished Angels is a pessimistic yet truthful film, riddled with irony of the cruellest kind and yet also darkly humorous and poetic (carrying a resonance of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, the epic poem that inspired Faulkner in the writing of his novel).   It helps that Sirk shows far greater restraint here than in many of his other films.  The performances are more introspective, the camerawork far less intrusive.  All this helps to give the film much greater emotional realism, in contrast to the somewhat contrived sentimentality of Sirk’s preceding melodramas.  Although it was ill-received by many critics when it was first released, The Tarnished Angels is now considered one of Sirk’s most important films.  Sirk himself considered this to be his finest work.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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