Rent The Tarnished Angels (1957)

Action Melodrama. - The Tarnished Angels review by Steve

Febrile southern melodrama (from William Faulkner) about the barnstormers of the 1930s who toured shabby exhibitions of hazardous flying stunts around the impoverished towns of the depression. Robert Stack plays a traumatised WWI flying ace who can only sustain himself through the habit of danger, while spurning his sexually frustrated wife (Dorothy Malone).

Into their orbit comes a poetic, drunken reporter (Rock Hudson) who is empathises with the reckless flyer while regretfully falling in love with his wife. Hudson is subdued and melancholy. Malone is blindingly sexy. Stack steals the film in a support role. They are all human wreckage. Stack conveys his reckless pessimism mutely, with his haunted thousand-yard 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 directed better than anyone, full of sex and pessimism. And disillusion with American capitalism. Hudson's scene when he drunkenly explains an airman's death to his editor is a classic. He and Malone prowl around each other like jumpy cats. It all ends quite cheerfully, but that's Hollywood.