"But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them." ~ Douglas Sirk 

Douglas Sirk was a smuggler as much as a film director who could eviscerate any All-American subject in such a way that his sly subversive commentary eluded mainstream eyes. The Tarnished Angels comes at the tail end of Sirk’s career and is simply one of his most memorable contributions to cinema, reuniting as it does three of the stars from his previous effort Written On The Wind and with the same screenwriter, George Zuckerman, doing the adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel 1935 Pylon. Irving Glassberg was a Universal house cinematographer who was restricted to black and white film instead of Sirk’s preferred colour because of Universal’s lack of faith in the project.

Former WWI flying ace Roger Shumann (Robert Stack) makes his living during the Great Depression by doing airshows and stunts with his parachutist wife LaVerne (Dorothy Malone). New Orleans reporter Burke Devlin (Rock Hudson) thinks there’s a human interest story for his readers and approaches the pair who are broke and need the help Devlin offers. The couple are having relationship difficulties and travel with their mechanic Jiggs (Jack Carson) and their young son. Devlin falls for LaVerne and is disgusted by the way Shumann treats her and she becomes torn between the two. 

Sirk had a solid grounding in theatre in Germany before the war and it serves him to advantage here as many of the tight, intimate scenes demand a deft touch from a director taking his actors from quiet underplaying to the boundary of exaggeration of expression. The reaction of many critics of the day was summed up by the curmudgeon Bosley Crowther of the New York Times calling the sentiments ‘inflated and blown out of all proportions’ and the acting ‘elaborate and absurd.’ Another critic called the acting ‘colourless’ – go figure - in actuality both had a kernel of truth. In the years since more appreciation for Sirk’s ironic and satiric subtleties has emerged and the film ages better than most late 1950s productions because of Sirk’s artistry.

Robert Stack plays an obsessed Shumann, driven and thoughtless in regard to anyone else’s feelings or input, and Stack does a great job to bring a smouldering intensity to it. His pilot is an unredeemable jerk who is happy to pimp his wife to the fat, leering money man (Robert Middleton) in order to keep flying his rickety jalopy with wings. The counterbalance is Hudson’s notional good guy character, who sees a story and wants to help out – but he has one eye on the prize and the prize is in a loveless marriage to an impotent and deeply disturbed flyer. Hudson is suitably earnest in a role that stretches him and Sirk ensures an undercurrent of lust is layered in with the human concern that Devlin exudes.

At the centre of their uneasy alliance is the damaged gem that is LaVerne. The complexities of the role are highlighted by the straightforward treatment that Sirk and Dorothy Malone employ. Malone is superb as the women who made a deal as a wide eyed youngster with dreams that crashed ashore on the rocks of the banal realities of life on the road eking out a hardscrabble existence and never getting ahead. So keen to ‘save’ her marriage she risks her life daily to play parachutist as a sop to her ungrateful husband - and add to that the very unglamourous role of single mother - as Schumann is as emotionally unavailable to his son as he is to his wife. Malone doesn’t need to overplay her hand and her restraint for the most part pays off in the occasional histrionic turn she falls into, she’s believable and compelling as an ordinary woman caught in a death spiral.

Sirk evinced an almost Bresson-ian flatness around the performances for much of the running time - which dilutes the melodrama aspect to a degree and makes the explosions of emotion more effective when they erupt - and as with Bresson that approach gave a hint of the banal grind of life in the heartland during the Great Depression. Risk as entertainment is now a ‘product’ to sell and titillate the grinding lives of ordinary people, and the fact that the air race is accompanied by a carnival is no accident. The death wish that Shumann struggles with is obviously related to his trauma and PTSD from WWI, a condition not well understood or diagnosed as such at the time, but Stack plays to the tortured psyche appropriately and his dilemma rings true. 

The third wheel character is Jiggs played by Jack Carson, an earnest and limited actor but cast well here. Jiggs has been in love with LaVerne for years - it’s hinted by others in the flyer community that he’s the real father of her son – and he obviously stays around for the torch he carries and to protect her from Shumann. This is a risqué scenario for a 1950s project and Sirk doesn’t shy away from showing any of the dimensions and nuances that this lurid situation throws up, and the fact he does this in a mainstream melodrama for a big Hollywood studio in Eisenhower/Leave It To Beaver America is some sleight of hand. The ending is a slightly ambiguous one, different from the bleak ending Faulkner wrote but effective, nonetheless.

The tone of the piece is aided immeasurably by the black and white cinematography, ironically imposed by Universal because of budgetary restrictions. Sirk had gloried in the mad colour swirls of his masterful 50s gems like All That Heaven Allows and Written On The Wind, but here the lack of colour speaks to the colourless lives of the protagonists, even in the ‘showbiz’ world of the barnstormers or the press pool. Peter Bogdanovich would deliberately employ B&W for the same effect in his superb period pieces The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon more than a decade later. Sirk had no reason to resent the limitation as evidenced by his assessment that the finished product was his best film, and for added heft he stated that Faulkner told him it was the best film adaptation made of any of his work.

The Tarnished Angels is a bitter art house ‘sex and death’ piece posing as a glossy Hollywood melodrama and did middling business with an audience then in thrall of TV family sitcoms and rote westerns. The critics at the time missed its worth too, but thankfully it is now seen as the masterpiece it is – simply unforgettable, it gets better with each passing year.