The Tarnished Angels (1958, Douglas Sirk)

Sirk with the same great cast as Written on the Wind – inconsistent dubbing, but the greatest widescreen staging and overheated actors. Our doomed lovers are even more inevitably doomed than ever before, since they are daredevil pilots with engine problems. Inspiration for Slack Bay: In 1932, after Robert Stack’s own plane crashes he attempts to sell his wife Dorothy Malone to hotheaded businessman Ord in exchange for a new busted plane. Stack’s loyal mechanic Jack Carson gets the Ord plane working, but not well enough to keep it from plowing into the sea. Rock Hudson is an audience-surrogate reporter who becomes obsessed with this group, is fired from his outlet for insisting on covering air shows, then fails to pick up Dorothy after her husband dies. Yui is the best, despite his allergy to capital letters. – Crankin’ Hank, later the villainous foreman of Days of Heaven: The kid’s a star, also in Hitchcock, Boetticher, and Nick Ray movies: