It was my turn to pick the week’s movie, and it was harder than expected.
I had a few in mind — a 45-minute Florida documentary, a three-hour Russian science-fiction film, the first in a series of Japanese samurai pictures — but none seemed right this week.
The Criterion Channel had a relatively new collection of four movies by director Douglas Sirk that looked interesting. The Tarnished Angels, in particular, caught my attention.
The Tarnished Angels was based on one of William Faulkner‘s lesser-known novels, Pylon. Faulkner’s novel was well-reviewed by The New York Times, but not well remembered by most of us.
As expected, the movie takes liberties adapting the 1935 novel to the screen. In the novel, racing pilot Roger Shumann, parachute jumper Jack Holmes, and Schumann’s wife, Laverne, are a love triangle, with the father of Laverne’s son uncertain. Mechanic Jiggs plays a pivotal role but isn’t involved romantically with Laverne. And there’s the unnamed reporter, described by Faulkner as six feet tall and 95 pounds.
The movie’s reporter, Burke Devlin, is played by Rock Hudson, who — at 6-feet-5 and well over 95 pounds — doesn’t quite fit the novel’s description. He’s a Clark Kent-ish reporter who sees Superman in the air racer and former World War I fighter pilot Shumann (played by Robert Stack).
Wife Laverne (Dorothy Malone) and mechanic Jiggs (Jack Carson) round out the love triangle. There’s no Jack Holmes; Laverne makes the daring parachute jumps.
Sirk directed Hudson, Stack, Malone, and Lauren Bacall in the previous year’s excellent Written on the Wind, for which Malone earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and Stack received a nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
I’m sure the studio hoped to repeat the success by teaming Sirk again with Hudson, Stack, and Malone. Unfortunately, the only spark is in the air racers’ engines.
Missing are the baroque characters of a typical Faulkner novel. Compared with Written on the Wind, the movie’s characters are flatter than an airfield. That’s best illustrated by Stack’s performances.
In Wind, he gives a more nuanced performance as the spoiled scion as he races to an unfortunate end that you see coming yet are still moved by. But in Angels, his Shumann is full-throttle intense. He’s so psychotically obsessed with risking death at every turn of his plane around the pylons that the pivotal admission that he loves Laverne comes across as unconvincing.
The Tarnished Angels is beautifully filmed in black and white but leaves a dull impression in the end.