Aerial Daredevils

Among the many novels of William Faulkner, Pylon is less well known today than some of the author’s more critically acclaimed works such as The Sound and the Fury, Intruder in the Dust and The Reivers (a 1962 Pulitzer Prize winner). Yet, the novel, dismissed by most critics of its era as a tawdry melodrama, is a deeply personal work, reflecting Faulkner’s keen interest in flying while including autobiographical details from his own life. The 1957 film adaptation of Pylon entitled The Tarnished Angels and directed by Douglas Sirk was also unfairly dismissed by critics at the time with one reviewer calling it “…cheaply written…abominably played…and absurd” while another panned it as “mostly colorless…and lacking in punch.” Most surprisingly, The Tarnished Angels reunited three of the main actors from Sirk’s Academy Award nominated Written on the Wind from the previous year – Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone (who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar) – but it was completely ignored by the Academy even though the movie is much more highly regarded now.

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A $20 Million Cinematic Landmark to Slapstick

When Steven Spielberg’s 1941 opened in December 1979, it was mostly savaged by the critics though a few rose to its defense like Pauline Kael who wrote, “…the film overall is an amazing, orgiastic comedy, with the pop culture of an era compacted into a day and a night. There are such surprising slapstick payoffs that the film’s commercial failure in this country didn’t make much sense.” When I caught up with 1941 in a repertory screening in 1982, I had to concur with Kael that Spielberg’s comic epic was unfairly maligned and great fun if you just go with the chaotic flow of it.   Continue reading