Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)"Tarnished Angels" must have been a huge surprise to its 1957 audience, who were used to Douglas Sirk's lavish melodramas in brilliant Technicolor, especially since it followed the '56 "Written on the Wind" with the same three stars. Based on Faulkner's "Pylon", it is the desperate story of a WWI ace pilot, now barnstorming across the country, trying to scratch out a living for himself and his wife and young son, and the journalist who wants to write a story about them. It has a Depression Era feeling throughout, and also goes back to Sirk's European roots, and has much more in common with Fellini's "La Strada" than with Sirk's better known Hollywood work, and some believe "Tarnished Angels" to be one of his finest films.
Rock Hudson as Burke, the journalist who is looking for a story and falls for the pilot's wife, gives his best dramatic performance, in what would be his last of many films for Sirk (Hudson was Sirk's favorite star). Robert Stack is superb as Roger, the tormented pilot, whose only true love is his airplane, and Dorothy Malone is fabulous as LaVerne, Roger's devoted wife. She has a sensuality that makes the story line of having numerous men in lust or love with her understandable, and among these men is Jiggs, the mechanical whiz who works on Roger's airplanes, and is well played by Jack Carson.
Others in the cast include Christopher Olsen, effective as young Jack, Robert Middleton as the unsavory Matt Ord, William Schallert as Ted, and briefly in some early scenes as a pilot, one can see Troy Donahue, who was to become a bobbysoxer heartthrob a year later with "A Summer Place". The b&w cinematography by Irving Glassberg is excellent, and the Frank Skinner score adds to the atmosphere. This is an unusual '50s film, and a must for Hudson fans. Total running time is 91 minutes.
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