Critics reviews

A bleak and even apocalyptic tale, it lightens up only slightly by the end. Our audiovisual essay analyzes a central scene 40 minutes into the narrative, and also refers both backward and forward in order to show the film’s richly elaborated logic of part and whole, repetition and stasis, drama and entropy.

Could this movie ever have been as great anywhere else, with any other collaborators on both sides of the camera? And again, it is especially Sirk’s command of the intimate moments that most elevates it—the way Malone walks across a room as Laverne and Burke (Hudson) talk about her Nebraska youth and Cather’s My Antonia, the light catching her so poetically.

Right away I start detaching a bit from the tawdry carnival atmosphere and the way Sirk prefers to use it as a signifier of decadence and death: the film hints at the corrosive viewpoint that would emerge further in IMITATION OF LIFE. My real problems begin as Malone starts narrating her past with full dramatic inflection, as if she were more full established as a character than she is, or as if she's hurrying the drama along.

One of the best films about America and all its whiplash-inducing contradictions... The Tarnished Angels shows a once-proud nation in free fall. You could pull up if you have it in you, but the ground's rushing up to greet you mighty fast.

If any American film fulfilled black-and-white 'Scope's particular ability to be simultaneously posh and déclassé, it is this, in which high ideals and base desires are cheek-and-jowl.

With its tangled shadows, fun-house mirrors, wrenching angles, and glaring lights, the wide-screen black-and-white photography evokes the psychological dislocations and distortions of the film's band of reckless and rootless outsiders and expressionistically thrusts Sirk's direction front and center even as the script's grand melodrama puts the teller of tales at the heart of the story.

Just as the characters reach for love amidst self-destruction, so does the eloquence of the storytelling--in both the book and the movie--find beauty in sordidness. Jonathan Rosenbaum likes to note that a young Luc Moullet compared the film's choreographic tracking shots to Faulkner's poetic run-on sentences. But Sirk's layered approach to melodrama, which married Bertolt Brecht's politicized concepts about mise-en-scene with raw emotional expression, has similarities with Faulkner's own.

Short, meaningless movements that are suddenly endowed with space: unforgettable. It’s this promiscuity made of confessions, monologues, stories and text. It’s this light that doesn’t come from the sky but from a night-light that still burns at dawn when all other fires have been put out. It’s this black and white that only means the colours have ended up deserting this world grown pale.

Based on a minor novel by William Faulkner (Pylon), the film betters the book in every way, from the quality of characterization to the development of the dark, searing imagery. Made in black-and-white CinemaScope, the film doesn't survive on television; it should be seen in a theater or not at all.