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The Tarnished Angels

(Douglas Sirk, USA, 1957)


 


Co-author: Cristina Álvarez López

These Dead Souls

This great ‘artistic director’ of theatre, student of [Erwin] Panofsky, interested in Japanese Kabuki, man of letters able to translate Shakespeare and recite Euripides by heart, who dreamed of being a painter and, in fact, never stopped painting …
                 - Gérard Legrand, Cinémanie (1979), pp. 322-323

It is often said that the mark of a good, rich film is when the part mirrors the whole – or, more specifically, that the structure of each individual scene reflects, as in a microcosm, the overall structure. If Douglas Sirk had a particular fondness for this way of working – and if his films provide especially dazzling examples of the process – that is no doubt because his films are often hell bent on emphasising a certain deathly repetition.

Sirk’s central characters (like those of his devotee, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) twist in their social traps, commit the same mistakes over and over, and trigger the same, perverse, interpersonal binds. In The Tarnished Angels specifically, the social situation of these characters is (for Sirk) rare and suggestively modern: they are all outside the settled norm, and their shared life hints at new sexo-affective arrangements. (The film tones down William Faulkner’s 1935 novel Pylon in this regard: there, the child has two possible fathers, and both these men are in the hothouse, communal mix.)

It can be like watching some grotesque, medieval pageant, where stereotypical figures perform their gestures mechanically, on a recurring, cyclical treadmill of harsh, fallen existence. The New Orleans Mardi Gras setting is especially well used, in this regard, for its high-artifice atmosphere of decadence. Jean-Loup Bourget has captured this saraband quality of the film well in his 1972 essay for Edinburgh Film Festival’s Douglas Sirk (1972) edited by Laura Mulvey and Jon Halliday.

The Tarnished Angels was a project long cherished by Sirk (ever since, in fact, he first encountered the novel in the 1930s), and he was able to make it in relative freedom near the end of his Hollywood career. It was undoubtedly the morbid, funereal, relentless quality of the story that attracted Sirk. A bleak and even apocalyptic tale, it lightens up only slightly by the end. The film is built upon a richly elaborated logic of part and whole, repetition and stasis, drama and entropy – bound together by a rigorously classical, “highly articulated” (as Bourget describes it) 3 day/3 night (+ final dawn) narrative structure.

Its central dramatic-poetic image is eloquent: the ‘show planes’ going around and around the pylons, part of a travelling ‘flying circus’ that (as Bourget points out) somewhat pathetically evokes the lost glory days of the first World War … making The Tarnished Angels the unheroic version of the many Hollywood movies about that war.

The opening credits say it all: they establish a pattern of character types and interrelationships that will be endlessly repeated, as if these characters are condemned to move about, in their fixed places and roles, in an infernal, unbreakable circle. (Beyond that circle: an unlovely, mass pack of ‘spectators’, out for blood as the pilots “kiss the pylon”, and unheeding of any rational advice when it comes to pouring out onto the track.)

It only takes Sirk two shots to lay all this out. Shot one: Burke (Rock Hudson) approaches, observing, as an outsider, a world of flyers (the type of self-sustaining, enclosed world that Sirk compared to a prison) from which he will always be, ultimately, excluded. Shot two: first up is the centre of power, Roger (Robert Stack) in the pilot seat, bad tempered, a loner, around whom everybody else obediently revolves. Next up is Roger’s subservient wife, LaVerne (Dorothy Malone), whose function, up in the airplane act, is to be a blonde, windblown, endangered sex-spectacle. Last and certainly least is Jiggs (Jack Carson, cast against his usual light-comedy type), a mechanic who is even more pathetically subservient to Roger, at first hidden in the frame, and then hardly able to hold his spot in the action.

A central scene, 32 minutes in, replays these group dynamics with Sirk’s typically deft variations and elaborations. Roger desperately needs a plane to compete in an upcoming pylon flying show, but to get it he must talk his wife into sleeping with sleazy money-man Matt Ord. How does the established pattern of relationships play itself out?

Burke has managed to enter the central group, and to draw closer emotionally to LaVerne – expressed here in their intimate dialogue, just as it is in an earlier scene. Yet Burke is always literally displaced by Roger, who wields his centrality, sucking everybody into his dark, sullen, tormented energy. We have already seen this, too: Roger, sensing a rival, takes back the spot that Burke has briefly inhabited. Jiggs makes the explicit connection between this scene unfolding in the present, and the flashback we have earlier witnessed of Roger’s perverse marriage proposal to LaVerne. The setting of a diner, the positioning of a triangle of seated figures, and the motif of a mirror reflection: all clinch this inevitable air of events repeating themselves hellishly.

In the present tense of the narrative, Jiggs is, once again, set off to the side, far from that central pivot of Roger. Even when he complains, he is ineffectual, and gives in fast and easily, just as he did in the flashback. Well into all these scenes, LaVerne remains the static object of all exchange, transfixed in her chair or sofa, steely but morose in her unhappy resignation to Roger’s will.

The direction of this scene – its framing, staging, lighting, blocking, and editing – is extraordinary. Sirk said it well: the camera must respond to the actors, and the actors must respond to the camera; it’s a mutual (if tense) dance. What could have been a flat or perfunctory rendering of dialogue is broken up and volatised into beats, steps, modulations of mood and drama. (It has been used as a film school exercise: giving students the dialogue of this scene and asking them, in groups, to devise and shoot a mise en scène for it – i.e., before showing them Sirk’s solution.) Every cut redistributes the lines of force in the film’s mobile diagram of the drama. In the CinemaScope frame, worked over with a finely baroque sense of clutter, human figures and objects (including, at times, outsize printed words) take on equal weight. Comparisons with Josef von Sternberg and Max Ophüls (especially Lola Montès [1955]) come to mind.

Sirk (like Otto Preminger) is a true master at how to dynamise the mundane actions of people sitting and standing. Notice how an initial shot of the sequence takes us from four characters (three seated, one standing), to three (all seated). This arrangement then allows the reverse shot of Burke, isolated alone in the frame on his side of the table, followed by successively closer two-shots on Roger and LaVerne. Music marks the first dramatic intensification of the scene, on Roger’s sudden, disconcerting question about Ord.

The next major shift comes when LaVerne stands up – introducing a new vector in this interrelated, group movement. Burke and then Jiggs rise out of their seats in turn, leaving Roger as the only one seated. Roger is diminished, atomised in this new mise en scène arrangement, and it looks for a moment as if he’s lost his power. But when Roger, too, stands, he’s giving the orders again, and stage-managing the conclusion of this group encounter.

One by one, the characters exit the scene and the space, while lights play over their figures, frames-within-the frame partition them, and a mirror reflection once more marks the evacuation of authentic feeling and action. Both in the part and in the whole, Sirk displays a fine penchant for gradually filling and just as gradually emptying his ‘pictures’. (Panofsky’s crucial notion of the role of idea in painting surely had a historic bearing on Sirk’s conception, developed in the overall context of German Expressionism, that – as Thomas Elsaesser summarised it in 1972 – “in order for a play to possess unity, the theatrical mise en scène must be organised around a certain dramatic idea, a single coherent interpretation, which translated into visual terms dominates the various elements”.)

Pauline Kael, in a characteristically dreadful moment, quipped: “It’s the kind of bad movie you know is bad – and yet you’re held” by it. Astonishing insight! Fassbinder, for his part, admired how, in The Tarnished Angels, “the camera is constantly in motion, acting like the people the film’s about, as if something were actually going on” (quoting from the translation in RWF’s The Anarchy of the Imagination, p. 85). He is precisely right about this: all the turbulent activity of these characters goes around and around in its predictable cycle, while nothing changes and allows the possibility of moving forward, until near the very end of the story. Just as the adults spin around in the planes, the child, Jack (Chris Olsen), appears imprisoned aloft in a rotating dodgem car (Fassbinder saw this kid as a projection of the individual spectator, trapped in his chair, unable to intervene in the mechanism of inevitable, tragic Fate). And just as a cramped-up blind organist must play, over and over, his dinky fairground version of “The Blue Danube” (Johann Strauss II and airborne flight: did Stanley Kubrick derive this association, inverted into awe, for 2001 [1968]?)

What’s happened to us, what the hell have we done to you?”, says Jiggs – placing that damage in the past tense. Fassbinder described how the characters – “these dead souls” – were done and dusted before their story even begins on screen. “In reality, they could all lie down and let themselves be buried” (Anarchy, p. 85). (Faulkner – who had based the book on his youthful, daredevil experience as part of the Flying Faulkners – judged the film to be “pretty good, quite honest”.) The novel, we daresay, is well below Faulkner’s best; The Tarnished Angels presents a rich case of screen adaptation (credited to George Zuckerman, who scripted Written on the Wind [1956]) that vastly improves on the source material.

This text draws upon three sources: the audiovisual essay we made in 2018; a section of AM’s book Last Day Every Day (punctum, 2012); and AM’s audio commentary included on 2008 Madman and 2013 Eureka DVD/Blu-ray editions of The Tarnished Angels.

© Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin May 2008 / January 2012 / April 2018


Film Critic: Adrian Martin
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