SoTrumpBelieve Must See Movie...

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

BasicLogic Although we got some of the famous actors at that time, but the screenplay was just bad, and the directing was not good either. How could it possible you'd so generously let three adult strangers and a kid you met in a carnival stay in your apartment? You bought two large paper bags of food and groceries for them, with a pretty woman beside you, but when you reached your apartment, the woman simply turned around and walked away. What was that woman's role? An escort? Just served the scene to accompany you back in the midnight? Then....well, what a terrible script with inexplainable and illogic storyline. The dialog felt more like the dialog we only saw in a play on a stage, not a bit natural at all. The original novel must be quite bad already, so when it was so stupidly adapted into a movie script, it became even worse. This film looked more like those movies adapted from those Tennessee Williams' plays, those dialog might feel okay on a stage, but once use them in movies, it's just felt awkward and unnatural.

evanston_dad "Pylon" is one of the few William Faulkner novels I've not read, but I can't imagine that "The Tarnished Angels," Douglas Sirk's rather mediocre screen version of it, does it justice.Missing from the film are many of the hallmarks that make other Sirk movies so compulsively watchable: the saturated colors, the absorbing melodrama, the keen social criticism that manages to target the very people who would have made up the audiences for his films. Instead, "The Tarnished Angels" is a black and white wide-screen yarn about a reporter (Rock Hudson) who becomes involved with a family of daredevil airshow performers and tries to step in and save the wife and mother (Dorothy Malone) when her husband (Robert Stack) is killed in an accident. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the book made some points about the effects of World War I on the men who came back from it and had to resume pedestrian lives. There are one or two references to the war in the film, and Robert Stack is depicted as a restless maverick with a death wish. But the movie doesn't have much of a point at all to make, and other than the considerable eye candy of Dorothy Malone, didn't have much of anything else to keep me interested.Grade: C

jc-osms Great for me to see this rarely-scheduled Douglas Sirk melodrama from his rich, late 50's period and it didn't disappoint. Taking as its subject the uncommon lifestyles of the participants in the popular flying-circus entertainments of the 20's and 30's, it's not long before the familiar Sirk themes of conflicting passions, human weakness and sacrifice raise their heads above the parapet.For some reason shot in black and white, perhaps to better enhance the period setting, I still firmly believe that all Sirk's work should be seen in glorious colour, no one filled these CinemaScope screens better than he in the affluent 50's. Only just lasting 90 minutes, it crams a lot into its time-frame, drawing convincing character-sketches of the lead parties, Rock Hudson's maverick journalist, generous of spirit and loquacious but seeking love in the person of the beautiful, sexy Dorothy Malone parachutist extraordinaire, she frustrated by the lack of attention she and her son get from her obsessive pilot husband Robert Stack, who'd rather fly above the clouds than engage with earth-dwellers. Throw in his grease-monkey Jack Carson who may have had a fling with Malone in the past and hangs around as much for the scraps she throws him as his duty to Stack and a Mr Big aircraft-owner with designs of his own on Malone and you have an eternal quadrangle ripe for tragedy.Sure enough, it happens along and spectacularly too, straightening out the lives of the survivors, even if not, I suspect for the better. The acting is first rate, Hudson again showing the depth that Sirk always seemed to draw out of him, handling long-speeches and a drunken scene with ease. Stack again displays his facility for acting against type, playing another emotionally stunted individual masquerading behind his good looks and bravura outlook. Malone however is the epicentre of the movie, the action revolves all around her and it's no wonder with her sexiness and sense of vulnerability, a killer combination for the menfolk here.Sirk's direction is excellent, juxtaposing thrilling action sequences in the air with oddly contrasting backgrounds - it's no coincidence that the drama is played out in New Orleans at Mardi-Gras time, with the use of masks often showing up in foreground and background as a metaphor for the concealed passions on display here. There are several memorable scenes, like when Hudson and Malone's first illicit kiss is disturbed jarringly by a masked party-goer and Stack's adoring son trapped on a fairground airplane-ride just as his father loses control of his real-life plane.So there you have it, another engrossing examination of fallible individuals, expertly purveyed by the best Hollywood director of drama in the 50's. Not as soap-sudsy as some of Sirk's other movies of the period, perhaps due to the literary source of the story, but engrossing from take-off to landing.

bkoganbing Based on the William Faulkner novel Pylon, The Tarnished Angels reunites Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, and Dorothy Malone three of the four stars who were in Written On The Wind the year before. In many ways the three are continuing the roles they played in that classic.The Tarnished Angels concerns a group of barnstorming air entertainers during the Depression years. Rock Hudson plays a newspaper reporter from the New Orleans Times Picayune who is at the carnival that they're appearing at and meets Robert Stack a former war ace from World War I who is now doing this kind of air racing and stunt flying for a living. Traveling with him are his son, Chris Olsen, wife Dorothy Malone, and mechanic Jack Carson.William Faulkner placed himself in the middle of this story and Hudson functions as his character. He sees and observes the characters around him and what he sees is what we read in the book and see on film. Stack is a man obsessed with flying itself above everything, including his own family. Wife Dorothy Malone is a woman with a loose reputation which she doesn't do much to quell rumors about. Her reputation is so bad that the parentage of Chris Olsen is brought into question. Here it's a matter of speculation, in the original novel there is a parachute jumper who is definitely identified as the possible real father of Olsen's character. Carson is Stack's fecklessly loyal mechanic and there's even some speculation about him being Olsen's father. In any event he's so totally loyal to Stack who occasionally uses him for a doormat that some critics have opined that the relationship between Carson and Stack's character might be gay.Douglas Sirk who did lush romances for the most part managed the special effects part of the film very well. The air race sequences are well photographed and breathtaking. I'm not sure how William Faulkner who was still alive when this film came out took to the changes in his novel. It probably was the best Universal could do and still be Code compliant. The Tarnished Angels is more a Douglas Sirk romance than a Faulkner novel, but that isn't necessarily bad.