The Tarnished Angels (Sirk, 1957): Regent Street Cinema, 1pm
This is one of my favourite ever films which grows in my estimation with every viewing. As Dave Kehr says in his Chicago Reader review see this at the cinema or not at all!Here is a superb Tate Modern introduction from 2013: Tarnished Angels, based on William Faulkner’s Pylon,
is a Depression-era story set during the New Orleans Mardi Gras of the
1930s. Rock Hudson plays a reporter fascinated by the marginal lives of a
fairground pilot and his wife, played by Robert Stack and Dorothy
Malone. Shot in lush, sweeping black-and-white CinemaScope, the camera
follows with fluid sweeps and pans the tragic plight of these passionate
lost souls caught in a downward spiral of obsession jealousy,
self-destruction and defeat. In 1975 Warren Sonbert described Sirk’s
cinema as follows:
The fetid taste of intrinsic imperfection, of behavioural mistakes endlessly repeated from generation to generation, find expression in the staggeringly demonic visual motifs recurring throughout Sirk’s films of the merry-go-round, the amusement park ride, the circular treadmill, the vehicle that really goes nowhere, insulated hopeless activity, the Western frame of mind, people struggling to get outside cages of their own building yet encased by their own unique palpable qualities.
Sonbert was known not only for his films and opera reviews but he was also a noted film critic. His writings about feature films are amongst his more extraordinarily profound and insightful creations. In them, he expressed admiration for a pantheon of American directors working within the studio system, including Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, and notably Douglas Sirk who appears in Sonbert’s film Noblesse Oblige (1981). He deeply admired Sirk’s ability to expose the ‘hollow cupidity and superficiality of middle class ideals’ and to accentuate the forces of destruction rent upon the nuclear family structure of the 1950s.
Chicago Reader review of The Tarnished Angels:
Douglas Sirk took a vacation from Ross Hunter and Technicolor for this
1958 production, though he retained Rock Hudson, who turns in an
astonishingly good performance as a journalist fascinated by the sordid
lives of a trio of professional stunt fliers (Robert Stack, Dorothy
Malone, and Jack Carson). Based on a minor novel by William Faulkner (Pylon),
the film betters the book in every way, from the quality of
characterization to the development of the dark, searing imagery. Made
in black-and-white CinemaScope, the film doesn't survive on TV;
it should be seen in a theater or not at all.
Dave Kehr
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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