Why so much hype?

The Worst Film Ever

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Terrific Douglas Sirk melodrama from the William Faulkner novel "Pylon." I have not read the Faulker book, but I'm guessing it was nowhere as soapy as the film, but as soapy melodrama's go, no one does them better than Douglas Sirk. Robert Stack plays a boozy disillusioned WWI flying ace who now spends his days as a barnstorming pilot at rural carnivals with his neglected parachutist wife, Dorothy Malone, who he only married as a result of a literal roll of the dice. Rock Hudson plays a reporter doing a story on this dysfunctional traveling family of flyers that also includes Jack Carson, Troy Donahue, and William Schallert. Sirk's perchance for over- the-top drama is probably not going to look great to modern viewers, but for fans of classic Hollywood and fans of Sirk in particular, this film is a must see!

"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

This black and white film is surprising. The action takes place in the early 1930s, prohibition still going on, but even so the film is strangely nostalgic of a time that has fully disappeared at the time the film was made. What makes Douglas Sirk so nostalgic about that past he was so fascinated by? Of course it is planes, and flying, and doing all kinds of silly things with these flying machines to dare the devil and to challenge death as if it were possible to challenge that devilish reaper. The second thing that attracts Sirk is the hero this pilot is, a war hero who has reformed himself and retrained himself into being a pilot for fun, a pilot to entertain crowds by taking risks and flying them in mid air, till one day the plane breaks down and the choice is between a simple crash on the funfair next door and a crash into the sea. That's the kind if choice that only dying people, people doomed to die can face and a hero is the one … but you know the answer to that, and rare are those who can do the right thing at such a moment. The third thing that attracts Sirk is the little boy who follows his father the daredevil that flies planes for the fun of others and his mother, the flying acrobat in the air with no net, no string to catch her, just her know how and courage to do what is to be done not to crash on the ground when she loses – on purpose of course – her parachute. The next thing that attracts Sirk is that immeasurable love between these two persons and the devotion a third person, an outsider, a man from the side feels and makes him play the gallant man not to break that couple but to serve the woman in that final drama of hers and to help the child cope with death and death and death again. A beautiful film with the end of a woman who finds the proper footing she needs to be up to raising her son in a treacherous world but in the memory of his father the flying hero.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID

Enjoyed this great cast of veteran actors and a very good story about a burned out war pilot, played by Robert Stack, who winds up in a carnival featuring planes flying in races. Stack's sidekick and mechanic is Jack Carson, (Jiggs),"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof",'58, who does everything that Stack desires. Dorothy Malone, is Stacks wife who sort of sky dives in a long white dress and gives all the boys a thrill of their lives in 1958. Rock Hudson,(Burke Devlin),"Darling Lili",'70 is a newspaper reporter who is a drunk and is trying to get a story about this former ace pilot. There is a point in the story which turns me off, it is when Robert Stack needs a new plane and offers his wife to spend the night with Robert Middleton,(Matt Ord),(a real slim ball)"Cattle King",'63 in order to obtain this plane, a so called sexual trade so to speak. Yet he claims he loves her very much. If you like to look back in the past, and like these actors, this is definitely the film to view.