If one didn’t know in advance 1957’s The Tarnished Angels was from a Faulker novel, the turgid dialogue might clue in a person. An example: “I could tell you an idyll of winged knights jousting with death, if I felt you could smell a story the way you smell whiskey.” Huh?
This is from Rock Hudson’s newspaper reporter, who is consistently under threat of termination from his editor. I’m not sure if this was in the time of prohibition, but that editor really has it in for Hudson because of the man’s taste for the bottle. A journalist who drinks? Perish the thought! And this takes place in New Orleans, and I imagine that place was something else in era when booze was illegal.
It also takes place during Mardi Gras, which cinema would have us believe is an all-year affair. Dorothy Malone manages to spin a comment on the non-stop drunken revelry into self-pity: “Drunk? The party’s next door. That’s how it’s always been–next door.” All the dialogue in this melodrama is like that: circuitous and unnecessarily convoluted. Every character here seems unable to get to the point.
If you’re going to watch an overheated production like this, you might as well watch one from the master of the form, and that is Douglas Sirk. This was one of eight movies he made with Hudson. In addition to Hudson and Malone, you have Robert Stack as a competitive flyer and Jack Carson as his mechanic. Those two are in a romantic triangle with her but, given the guys aren’t attracted to each other, isn’t it just a love angle? Then Hudson also seems interested in her which makes this…what, a love square? In the age of polyamory, I wonder if anybody will find themselves in a love dodecahedron.
For whatever reason, Hudson is obsessed with this trio and invites them to stay with him at his apartment. He even chooses paling around with them over his job, losing that after he covers an air show instead of conducting an interview with a presidential candidate. Really, I can see the editor’s side on this, even if he has curious ideas, describing those who stage the air shows as “Gypsies—they’re from hunger”. Given he is an educated man, one would think he would know the country’s name is pronounced “Hun-gar-ee”. But even Hudson is disgusted by the corporate sponsorship of the planes, which is a quaint conceit in today’s hyper-monetization of everything. One plane has a large “7-11” on it, but I don’t think it was sponsored by the convenience store chain.
In a flashback, we see Malone when she discovers she’s knocked up. Stack decides he and Carson will role dice to decide who will do the honor of marrying her. That was pretty strong stuff for 1957. The dice are made by marking up the sides of sugarcubes. Apparently, people back then had to make their own die. Stack wins the roll and ties the knot with Malone. I like to think Carson eventually was inspired by this to invent the game Yahtzee.
In the present, Malone’s baby has grown up into nine-year-old Christopher Olsen. The kid idolizes Stack and thrills to watching the man he considers to be his dad clipping the pylons when making sharp turns in aerial races.
A race against Troy Donahue results in the crash and death of that young pilot. That pilot, nicknamed “Crash” had been flying for Robert Middleton. Call me crazy, but I think I would always bet against a man named Crash.
Middleton has another plane, but he doesn’t think it can be repaired to fly again. Carson thinks it can, but it will take extra grease to convince Middleton that Stack is the right man to fly, given the long history of animosity between the two. Stack sends Malone Middleton’s way to convince the man.
What Stack doesn’t know is Hudson ran interference and convinced Middleton himself. But Malone wants Stack to think she made the arrangement in trade, if only to make him squirm as much as he has made her do so over the years. The man may already have enough on his mind, given Carson warns him against flying what he considers to be a deathtrap: “Why don’t you just let me put a bullet through your brain?”
Oh, how I wish Stack had taken him up on that offer. This is not his best work. I understand the intention was to portray his character as the strong, driven, silent type, but he was little more to me than a deeply unpleasant jerk. Funny, but much of his performance here reminded of his character in Airplane!, and not because both pictures are about planes. It is more so the weird aspect of ridiculously straight acting in serious pictures that can become so brutally funny in parodies. It’s what worked for Leslie Nielsen in the same film.
Carson fares better, though I can’t recall a movie in which I didn’t like his performance, regardless of my opinion of the movie overall. Hudson, alas, is not believable at all and I suspect that is largely because he doesn’t seem certain of his own motives and intentions. He especially failed to convince me he is romantically interested in Malone. And she has an odd role, largely done in hysterics which seem to foreshadow Ann-Margret in such pictures as Kitten with a Whip. That isn’t a compliment.
Given nobody would describe Sirk as a master of action sequences, it is surprising these are the best moments in the runtime and a good reason for giving it a viewing. I would think that planes flying in circles would be as uninteresting to me as cars doing 500 circuits, yet these sequences are exciting, suspenseful and easy to follow. A plane bisected by another scans as completely unfeasible, yet I wonder how they accomplished that. I suspect it was done with models, but it looks authentic enough.
My thoughts about The Tarnished Angles can be summed up, strangely enough, by signs we see in a couple of sets. In Middelton’s garage, there is one that reads, “THINK”. I like to believe IBM placed that sign there without his knowledge, as they had been putting them up all around their corporate offices around the same time. As far as the film is concerned, I wish the screenwriters had done a bit more thinking when penning the script. I also want to point out a different sign, this one in the newspaper office, which reads, “Is it interesting?” I’ll take this one, and the answer is largely “no”.
Dir: Douglas Sirk
Starring Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Jack Carson
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray