The barnstorming pilots in The Tarnished Angels are the director's definitive rootless, speed-obsessed heroes, content with the low pay and disrespect afforded fliers so long as they can soar through the air. Yet when Stack takes to the air to race, he's confined to ever tighter and tighter loops around the course's pylons, an inward spiral that becomes the more dangerous the closer he gets to the center. Either extreme can lead to tragedy. Sirk never resolves the conflicts, nor does he even seem to hold out hope for the possibility of common ground. This ability to embrace the complexity of his characters is the main reason these films are better than the '50s critics who dismissed them first thought, and even better than some of Sirk's most fervent contemporary admirers would have you believe.
Happiness is just out of reach, tantalizingly beyond the omnipresent mirrors and window panes.
Scorn or laugh at them, and you're only admitting that you refuse to see how well Sirk has described you. Sirk's use of melodrama is refreshingly free of condescension, either to his own characters or to all of us who are watching. Sirk's characters are allowed responsibility for their actions, and the possibility of self-awareness, if not redemption. We are never talked down to and told how to think. You only have to be clear-eyed enough to see it.