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)
"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)