Tarnished Angels

The title of Faulkner’s 1935 novel Pylon refers to the markers that form the three points around which pilots fly in races at air shows. The title has certain phallic meanings attached to the male obsession with technology and speed in the novel, and to Laverne Shumann’s passion for her husband Roger. In Douglas Sirk’s adaptation Tarnished Angels (1958) the phallic imagery is replaced with a reference to Laverne herself, a reference that creates a more moralistic story that the one Faulkner wrote. Nonetheless, Tarnished Angels is a fairly successful adaptation that captures many of the basic elements of the novel as well as some of its nuances—the ever-present voice of the announcer at the air show, the flicking beacon light in the scenes where rescuers search for Shumann’s body, Jiggs’ obsession with boots, the boy Jack’s enraged reactions to taunts about his uncertain paternity.

Where the film falters as an adaptation is in its moralistic and sentimentalizing treatment of Laverne. In both the novel and the film we learn that Laverne was born in the Midwest and that after meeting Shumann at an air show when she was 16 she runs away with him. Faulkner uses the idea of the Midwest to signify where Laverne came from, but not where she wants to return—Faulkner portrays the aviators as essentially homeless, a peculiarly modern breed who have moved beyond, transcended, the need for place, home, and so on. Although there are suggestions that Laverne longs for home and place, she always moves on, and the end of the novel is a dark conclusion. No return to Kansas (or Ohio) for her. In the film, the Reporter finds Laverne in his apartment reading his copy of My Antonia, by Willa Cather, a novel that celebrates the value of patria. At the end of the novel we see her with the novel again—the Reporter has loaned it to her and asked her to return it to him personally at some time in the future. This is the film’s dunderheaded way of making clear that Laverne after all is a good girl associated with the values of patria and who doesn’t really want to live the life she has been living, that she wants something simpler and more conventional and more virtuous. Moreover, at the end of the film the Reporter has talked Laverne out of allowing Matt Ord to keep her as his mistress and instead convinced her to go home to Ohio and start a new life with her son. This is a dramatically different conclusion than the one we get in the novel, where she leaves her son with Roger Shumann’s parents and goes off with Jack (who has virtually no role in the film—his character is largely subsumed into that of Jiggs). Therefore the film sentimentalizes Pylon and turns it into the story of how Laverne, the tarnished angel of the title, resolves to return to the American Midwest of her birth and to a conventional family life, even if without Roger. (A female Nick Carroway).

Rock Hudson’s portrayal of the Reporter (who in the film is named Burke Devlin) is fairly effective. Hardly as complex or bizarre as the Reporter is in the novel, considerably more benign, nonetheless his fascination with the aviators and especially with Laverne clouds his judgment. Largely through him the film tells its story. In one of the final scenes in the film, Devlin goes to the newspaper room where he used to work and tells the story of the Shumanns that his editor did not allow him to write. There is a parallel scene in the novel, but there are significant differences between the two stories.

Shumann in the novel does not have much of a past. In the film, he is a former World War I ace aviator (many stunt pilots were former military pilots). When he dies, he is hailed as a hero who directed his plane into the lake rather than risk injuring spectators by a crash landing on the shore. In the film, before his final race, Shumann apparently tells Laverne that he loves her and wants to settle down. There is no such sentimentalizing moment in the novel. Shumann dies untamed and undomesticated, and Laverne exits the novel in much the same way as well.

In both the film and the novel New Orleans is an important setting—Mardi Gras and the airport where the air races take place. Faulkner invests the novel with an atmosphere of the surreal and the bizarre. The effect is disorienting and in part is meant to convey the very different world of the aviators that the Reporter is encountering. It is not only what Faulkner describes that creates this effect as it is his method of description. The distinctive idiosyncratic language of the novel—the coining of words, the run-on sentences, the piling of adjective on adjective, the highly subordinated sentences—place the reader in the Reporter’s perspective, to an extent. The film doesn’t have the advantage of language, except that spoken by characters, but it manages to capture some of the effect of Faulkner’s language by having characters—especially the Reporter—speak it, sometimes almost line by line.

Pylon did not seem a “Southern” novel in any traditional sense of the word. One of the points of the novel was that it was describing a “new” South, one of technology and cities and new kinds of human relationships. We can say the same about Tarnished Angels. There are few if any Southern accents in the novel, and the only way we can identify it with the American South is through our knowledge that New Orleans is the setting.

Faulkner novels are difficult to film because they so often are narrated from within the consciousness of one or more of his characters. This is certainly the case in Pylon, where the Reporter is the focus of the narration almost exclusively throughout. It is both the story that he tells as well as the way he tells it. The state of his consciousness is as much a part of the story as is the story itself. Tarnished Angels doesn’t go nearly as far as the novel does in inhabiting the consciousness of the Reporter and conveying it to the audience. The Reporter in the novel is an emotional cripple who wreaks damage on the aviators through his self-absorbed meddling and voyeurism. In Tarnished Angels he is merely a romantic who allows his fascination with a beautiful woman to cloud his judgment, and in the end he behaves in a moral and conventional way by giving her money and arranging for her to return to a respectable life in the mid-west. In the novel, the Reporter and Jiggs secretly send money with the boy, stashed in his toy airplane. One of Shumann’s parents, enraged by the plane and what it represents, and wanting to wipe out entirely the boy’s memory of that part of his life, throws it into the fire.