TCM at 10pm: Douglas Sirks THE TARNISHED ANGELS (1957), based on William Faulkners PYLON, is marvelously kinetic from its first image to its last. This black-and-white treasure, with a lot of help from rapturous lateral tracks, is one of the few 50s films to master the wide-screen aesthetic and turn it into something both dynamic and ambiguous.The look of the film is almost contrapuntal to the stark tale of a few tragic days at a 1920s New Orleans airshow in the midst of Mardi Gras revels. The fading glories and mortal shames of a tight-knit family of barnstorming airplane racers are exposed through the aching naivete of heart-on-the-sleeve melodrama. The people dont talk in this movie. They communicate only through studied, revelatory dialogue and heavy doses of purple prose. Dorothy Malone, as a midwestern earth mother, is noteworthy on vertiginously high heels as she strides in body-molded white dresses. The ingenuous Rock Hudson may not have fit the bill as Faulkners idea of a hard-drinking newshound, but it falls to him to deliver the passionately romantic, word-delirious eulogy on the love, honor, and heroism that the author perceived beneath the sordid veneer of a tacky air circus.
Posted on: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 23:57:33 +0000
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