ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

gavin6942 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.

jacobs-greenwood A Douglas Sirk soap opera based on the William Faulkner novel Pylon (George Zuckerman wrote the screenplay) that's overrated by Leonard Maltin, among others.Robert Stack plays a former World War I flying ace who only finds work now in air shows, flying around pylons racing with other pilots like NASCAR drivers do around racetracks. Dorothy Malone plays his too attractive for "his" own good wife, especially with Rock Hudson around. Jack Carson plays Stack's socially dim-witted, too old to still be attractive, longtime friend and mechanic. The three (four with Stack's and Malone's 10 year old son) barely get by financially as they travel the country, with Stack's stunts providing their only means.Hudson plays a reporter in the town they're currently in who finds a "how the mighty have fallen" story in the tension these three adults exude. Robert Middleton plays Stack's former boss, now competitor, and soon to be partner through circumstances he can't avoid.Interesting, but average. None of the character's are particularly credible, and none of the acting performances are memorable either (though Malone is beautiful, even in black-and-white), save for Carson's Jiggs, if you can believe it.

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.

Ed Uyeshima 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.