Although we got some of the famous actors at that time, but the screenplay was just bad, and the directing was not good either. How could it possible you'd so generously let three adult strangers and a kid you met in a carnival stay in your apartment? You bought two large paper bags of food and groceries for them, with a pretty woman beside you, but when you reached your apartment, the woman simply turned around and walked away. What was that woman's role? An escort? Just served the scene to accompany you back in the midnight? Then....well, what a terrible script with inexplainable and illogic storyline. The dialog felt more like the dialog we only saw in a play on a stage, not a bit natural at all. The original novel must be quite bad already, so when it was so stupidly adapted into a movie script, it became even worse. This film looked more like those movies adapted from those Tennessee Williams' plays, those dialog might feel okay on a stage, but once use them in movies, it's just felt awkward and unnatural.

Great for me to see this rarely-scheduled Douglas Sirk melodrama from his rich, late 50's period and it didn't disappoint. Taking as its subject the uncommon lifestyles of the participants in the popular flying-circus entertainments of the 20's and 30's, it's not long before the familiar Sirk themes of conflicting passions, human weakness and sacrifice raise their heads above the parapet.For some reason shot in black and white, perhaps to better enhance the period setting, I still firmly believe that all Sirk's work should be seen in glorious colour, no one filled these CinemaScope screens better than he in the affluent 50's. Only just lasting 90 minutes, it crams a lot into its time-frame, drawing convincing character-sketches of the lead parties, Rock Hudson's maverick journalist, generous of spirit and loquacious but seeking love in the person of the beautiful, sexy Dorothy Malone parachutist extraordinaire, she frustrated by the lack of attention she and her son get from her obsessive pilot husband Robert Stack, who'd rather fly above the clouds than engage with earth-dwellers. Throw in his grease-monkey Jack Carson who may have had a fling with Malone in the past and hangs around as much for the scraps she throws him as his duty to Stack and a Mr Big aircraft-owner with designs of his own on Malone and you have an eternal quadrangle ripe for tragedy.Sure enough, it happens along and spectacularly too, straightening out the lives of the survivors, even if not, I suspect for the better. The acting is first rate, Hudson again showing the depth that Sirk always seemed to draw out of him, handling long-speeches and a drunken scene with ease. Stack again displays his facility for acting against type, playing another emotionally stunted individual masquerading behind his good looks and bravura outlook. Malone however is the epicentre of the movie, the action revolves all around her and it's no wonder with her sexiness and sense of vulnerability, a killer combination for the menfolk here.Sirk's direction is excellent, juxtaposing thrilling action sequences in the air with oddly contrasting backgrounds - it's no coincidence that the drama is played out in New Orleans at Mardi-Gras time, with the use of masks often showing up in foreground and background as a metaphor for the concealed passions on display here. There are several memorable scenes, like when Hudson and Malone's first illicit kiss is disturbed jarringly by a masked party-goer and Stack's adoring son trapped on a fairground airplane-ride just as his father loses control of his real-life plane.So there you have it, another engrossing examination of fallible individuals, expertly purveyed by the best Hollywood director of drama in the 50's. Not as soap-sudsy as some of Sirk's other movies of the period, perhaps due to the literary source of the story, but engrossing from take-off to landing.

This black and white film is surprising. The action takes place in the early 1930s, prohibition still going on, but even so the film is strangely nostalgic of a time that has fully disappeared at the time the film was made. What makes Douglas Sirk so nostalgic about that past he was so fascinated by? Of course it is planes, and flying, and doing all kinds of silly things with these flying machines to dare the devil and to challenge death as if it were possible to challenge that devilish reaper. The second thing that attracts Sirk is the hero this pilot is, a war hero who has reformed himself and retrained himself into being a pilot for fun, a pilot to entertain crowds by taking risks and flying them in mid air, till one day the plane breaks down and the choice is between a simple crash on the funfair next door and a crash into the sea. That's the kind if choice that only dying people, people doomed to die can face and a hero is the one … but you know the answer to that, and rare are those who can do the right thing at such a moment. The third thing that attracts Sirk is the little boy who follows his father the daredevil that flies planes for the fun of others and his mother, the flying acrobat in the air with no net, no string to catch her, just her know how and courage to do what is to be done not to crash on the ground when she loses – on purpose of course – her parachute. The next thing that attracts Sirk is that immeasurable love between these two persons and the devotion a third person, an outsider, a man from the side feels and makes him play the gallant man not to break that couple but to serve the woman in that final drama of hers and to help the child cope with death and death and death again. A beautiful film with the end of a woman who finds the proper footing she needs to be up to raising her son in a treacherous world but in the memory of his father the flying hero.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID

After two undistinguished movies ("Battle Hymn" and "interlude" ),Sirk teamed up again with three actors of the fabulous quartet who made "written on the wind" a classic of the fifties.Robert Stack said once that Sirk was his favorite director and Rock Hudson was never better than with Sirk with whom he made 8 movies,including some of the director's best ("wind" "all that Heaven allows" "magnificent obsession").This one was the last one they made together:it is the gloomiest of them all and its bleak black and white is downright depressing."Tarnished angels" takes place in dark rooms in the darkest night ,and the thought of Death hangs over the whole film: this dead head which suddenly bursts in the bedroom where Hudson is comforting Malone (absolutely stunning) ,the black birds , flying in the sky on the fateful morning,the coffin they carry on a desert airstrip.In Sirk's follow-up,"a time to love and a time to die" Death will be felt everywhere ,not only on the battle fields ,but also in Berlin in ruins: this empty street where there's only a hearse and a horse while the inhabitants are in the shelter is an exact equivalent of the scene of the coffin at dawn.He transcends melodrama with his end-of-the-world pictures .The flaming colors of the cars tearing along the oil wells road or of the clothes in "written on the wind " have given way to gray: old crates , washouts ,forgotten heroes(Stack) ,lost illusions (romantic heroine,a reporter who is always drunk :Hudson's hair is all messed up ,and people who think he was a limited inexpressive actor should watch the scene when he "writes" Stack's epitaph in front of his boss and his colleagues .Dorothy Malone,too,found her two best parts in Sirk's movies before ending up as Sharon Stone's lover in "basic instinct " (her reappearance was the only interest of that flick,at least to my eyes,even if it only were for three or four minutes).We feel that Sirk is missing Zarah Leander ,his German star of the thirties and that,among all the American actresses he worked with,Malone was certainly the one who reminded him the most of his lost chanteuse.Although she won the AA for best suooorting actress for the part of Marylee,her portrayal of LaVerne is subtler,deeper ,less clichéd and more moving . Stack is as good as in "wind" :he could not have a child in the former and there was this genial short scene of a kid riding a clockwork horse ;in the latter there's this sublime sequence of his boy in his little plane when his father's crate is crashing.His character is reminiscent of the heroes of the thirties ,these of " heroes for sale" or " I'm a fugitive from a chain gang" ,people who risked their lives for their country and who got a raw deal afterward .There's a terrifying contrast between the lugubrious atmosphere of the movie and the Mardi Gras festivities;Sirk works with his camera the way a painter does with light ,to create different effects and textures highlights and shadows , recalling sometimes his German era,filming the shadow of the blinds on a face like he used to do in such works as "la Habanera" (1937).Like this?Try this ......"The gypsy moths" ,John Frankenheimer (1969)