Rent The Tarnished Angels (1957)

Action Melodrama. - The Tarnished Angels review by Steve

Febrile southern melodrama (from William Faulkner) about the barnstormers of the thirties who toured their shabby exhibition of hazardous flying stunts around the impoverished towns of the depression. They are led by a former WWI pilot (Robert Stack), a broken down war hero who can only sustain himself through the habit of danger, while destroying the life of his sexually frustrated wife (Dorothy Malone).

Into their orbit comes a poetic, drunken reporter (Rock Hudson) who is similarly damaged and empathises with the reckless flyer while regretfully falling in love with his wife. Hudson gives a subdued, melancholy performance. Malone is blindingly, maturely sexy. Stack is in a support role but steals the film. All of these characters are human wreckage, but Stack conveys his reckless pessimism wordlessly, with a haunted, infinite stare.

The flying scenes in b&w Cinemascope are exciting, but Douglas Sirk is far more interested in the psychology of his characters, the living debris of war and economic futility. The grinding, tawdry poverty of the travelling carnival and its exotic, fatalistic performers is palpable and pitiful and seductive.

It's the kind of breathy melodrama that Sirk could make better than anyone, full of sex and pessimism and extreme emotions. And disillusion with American capitalism. Hudson's scene when he drunkenly explains an airman's death to his editor is a classic. Hudson and Malone prowl around each other like jumpy cats. There's a lot of lyrical, gloomy innuendo. It ends a little cheerfully, but that's Hollywood.