Purely Joyful Movie!

Am I Missing Something?

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Story of a friendship between an eccentric journalist (Rock Hudson)and a daredevil barnstorming pilot (Robert Stack).The Universal-International film reunited director Sirk with Stack, Malone, and Hudson, with whom he had collaborated on "Written on the Wind" two years earlier. Sirk chose to shoot "Angels" in black-and-white to help capture the despondent mood of the era in which it is set. Faulkner considered the film to be the best screen adaptation of his work.The reviews on this film have improved with age, due in part to Sirk really not getting respect until much later (thanks in part to Fassbinder). I found the film to be solid, and would rank it among the very best of Sirk's work. Truly a must-see. Not quite a noir, but still on the edges of that world.

After two undistinguished movies ("Battle Hymn" and "interlude" ),Sirk teamed up again with three actors of the fabulous quartet who made "written on the wind" a classic of the fifties.Robert Stack said once that Sirk was his favorite director and Rock Hudson was never better than with Sirk with whom he made 8 movies,including some of the director's best ("wind" "all that Heaven allows" "magnificent obsession").This one was the last one they made together:it is the gloomiest of them all and its bleak black and white is downright depressing."Tarnished angels" takes place in dark rooms in the darkest night ,and the thought of Death hangs over the whole film: this dead head which suddenly bursts in the bedroom where Hudson is comforting Malone (absolutely stunning) ,the black birds , flying in the sky on the fateful morning,the coffin they carry on a desert airstrip.In Sirk's follow-up,"a time to love and a time to die" Death will be felt everywhere ,not only on the battle fields ,but also in Berlin in ruins: this empty street where there's only a hearse and a horse while the inhabitants are in the shelter is an exact equivalent of the scene of the coffin at dawn.He transcends melodrama with his end-of-the-world pictures .The flaming colors of the cars tearing along the oil wells road or of the clothes in "written on the wind " have given way to gray: old crates , washouts ,forgotten heroes(Stack) ,lost illusions (romantic heroine,a reporter who is always drunk :Hudson's hair is all messed up ,and people who think he was a limited inexpressive actor should watch the scene when he "writes" Stack's epitaph in front of his boss and his colleagues .Dorothy Malone,too,found her two best parts in Sirk's movies before ending up as Sharon Stone's lover in "basic instinct " (her reappearance was the only interest of that flick,at least to my eyes,even if it only were for three or four minutes).We feel that Sirk is missing Zarah Leander ,his German star of the thirties and that,among all the American actresses he worked with,Malone was certainly the one who reminded him the most of his lost chanteuse.Although she won the AA for best suooorting actress for the part of Marylee,her portrayal of LaVerne is subtler,deeper ,less clichéd and more moving . Stack is as good as in "wind" :he could not have a child in the former and there was this genial short scene of a kid riding a clockwork horse ;in the latter there's this sublime sequence of his boy in his little plane when his father's crate is crashing.His character is reminiscent of the heroes of the thirties ,these of " heroes for sale" or " I'm a fugitive from a chain gang" ,people who risked their lives for their country and who got a raw deal afterward .There's a terrifying contrast between the lugubrious atmosphere of the movie and the Mardi Gras festivities;Sirk works with his camera the way a painter does with light ,to create different effects and textures highlights and shadows , recalling sometimes his German era,filming the shadow of the blinds on a face like he used to do in such works as "la Habanera" (1937).Like this?Try this ......"The gypsy moths" ,John Frankenheimer (1969)

This is the forgotten Douglas Sirk film from his golden period in the 1950's when he made such classic Baroque-style women's pictures as "Magnificent Obsession", "All That Heaven Allows", "Written on the Wind" and "Imitation of Life". The black-and-white 1958 film doesn't have the saturated color palette of Sirk's frequent cinematographer, Russell Metty (who did lens those other films), nor does the story, based on William Faulkner's novel "Pylon", have as strong an orientation toward a female protagonist as the others. Yet, the film has many of the filmmaker's trademark melodramatic flourishes and some superb shot compositions, this time photographed by Irving Glassberg. The result is quite worthwhile and sadly not available yet on DVD.Set in 1932 New Orleans (though you can hardly tell from the anachronistic 1950's-era wardrobe and sets), the plot focuses on Roger Shumann, a former WWI flying ace who has been relegated to racing around pylons in air shows for prize money. He's married to LaVerne, so in love with Roger that she became a parachute jumper to please him, while raising their son Jack, who worships the ground on which Roger walks. Speaking of hero worship, there is also the dim-witted Jiggs, Roger's loyal mechanic, who holds a torch for LaVerne. Into this dysfunctional band comes local newspaperman Burke Devlin, who smells a good story in reporting on this transient family living hand to mouth to fulfill Roger's intractable need to fly. A lot of emotional gut-punches are thrown among these characters, especially between Roger and LaVerne, until a late moment of clarity seems to arrive too late. The last fifteen minutes contain come far-fetched plot convolutions, but they are in the spirit of the piece.Sirk reunited three of his stars from 1956's "Written on the Wind" - Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone - to play the three principals, so they know how to maintain conviction with more than a touch of Sirk's often maddening soap opera excess. Hudson, in particular, really shines in this sort of material as Devlin, even in a hilariously conceived drunken speech at the end. Stack is his typical jaw-clenching self though with a morbid sense of self-loathing only Sirk could serve up, and Malone is surprisingly sensual as LaVerne, whether fighting off her impulses about Devlin or hanging on to a trapeze bar as she floats off her parachute with her skirt billowing up (a classic shot). Jack Carson plays Jiggs as the pathetically smitten man he is, while Christopher Olsen has a heartbreaking scene where he is stuck on an amusement park ride watching fate deal its hand (trivia - Olsen is Cindy Brady's real-life brother). This isn't an out-and-out great film but still a very watchable entry in the Sirk canon.

Even though I haven't seen this movie in quite a while, it's ironic I would write this review shortly after viewing "Written On The Wind" for the first time recently. "Ironic" because of the main actors star in both films: Robert Stack, Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone, and both films were directed by Douglas Sirk.Personally, I thought this film was far more interesting than the more well-known WOTW. This was a better story.Dorothy Malone, for one, looked a heckuva lot better in this movie. She had some classic beauty and shows it here more than the trampy role in the other film. I also preferred this film because it had some fascinating and dramatic flying scenes, things I have never seen before on film. Apparently, they had these 1930s air races in which planes few around pylons, almost like a horse race on land. This is the only film I've seen that pictured.Another thing I enjoyed was Hudson's dramatic story at the end of the movie which, at first, seemed ridiculously melodramatic but was said so well that I found in very compelling, and it tied the whole story together. I also appreciated Malone doing the right thing at the end, telling off Hudson for coming on to her, since she was a married woman. This is one of the few films - including those in the 1950s - in which adultery is NOT treated mater-of-factly.