SUBJECTS

Air pilots -- United States -- Drama, Air pilots' spouses -- Drama, Air shows -- Drama, Man-woman relationships -- United States -- Drama

The Tarnished Angels

New 35mm Print!

  • Introduction by Lynda Myles

    Lynda Myles was director and curator of the Pacific Film Archive between 1980 and 1982 and is currently a film producer in London.

The tracking shots, the crane shots, the pans! I have rarely felt fear and loneliness so much as in this film.

R.W. Fassbinder
featuring

Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Jack Carson,

Featuring the same principals as Douglas Sirk’s celebrated Written on the Wind, and adapted by the same writer (from William Faulkner's novel Pylon), The Tarnished Angels plays out many of the earlier movie’s themes—obsession, jealousy, self-destruction, defeat—but in a different key. Hysterical Technicolor affluence is replaced here by marginal Depression-era Americana, shot by Irving Glassberg in lush, melancholy black-and-white. Rock Hudson gives one of his best performances as a New Orleans newspaperman who develops an unprofessional fascination with carnival flier Robert Stack and his wife Dorothy Malone, a blonde in a pure white dress who’s made a profession of falling. Hudson’s passivity is an effective counterpoint to Stack’s characteristic desperation; although Hudson calls Malone a creature from another planet, the shadows under her eyes mark her as all too human. The Tarnished Angels is best experienced on the big screen, where the sweep of CinemaScope gives visceral impact to the film’s fatalistic circularity, the camera repeating the fliers’ compulsive loop around the pylons.

Juliet Clark
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • George Zuckerman
Based On
  • the novel Pylon by William Faulker

Cinematographer
  • Irving Glassberg
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 35mm
Source
  • Universal Pictures
CINEFILES

CineFiles is an online database of BAMPFA's extensive collection of documentation covering world cinema, past and present.

View The Tarnished Angels documents  

F is for Faulkner : The tarnished angels (program note), Harvard Film Archive, 2004

Douglas Sirk, conversations avec un témoin du siècle: le cinéaste y parle du nazism, de Brecht-- (article), Libération, Edouard Waintrop, 1997

Revivals in focus (review), Village Voice, Tom Allen, 1988

Flying (review), Village Voice, J. Hoberman, 1988

Sirk masterworks (review), Soho Weekly News, Fred Camper, 1976

Douglas Sirk (program note), National Film Theatre (London, England), Jon Halliday, 1972

La ronde de l'aube (article), Casterman (Firm), Jean Wagner, 1971

Tarnished angels, The (review), Monthly Film Bulletin, 1958

The tarnished angels (review), Variety, William Whitney, 1957

Patterns of power and potency, repression and violence: an introduction to the study of Douglas Sirk's films of the 1950s (article), Velvet Light Trap, Michael Stern

Displaying 10 of 13 publicly available documents.


View all The Tarnished Angels documentation on CineFiles.