Sirk was arguably at his best when working with the energy of Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind and Tarnished Angels; they are like two raw nerves, a compendium of the private and global anxieties of our times. Tarnished Angels, based on William Faulkner's Pylon, is a Depression-era story of reporter Rock Hudson's fascination with the marginal lives of fairground flier Stack and his wife Malone, whose rival for her husband's passions is death itself. R. W. Fassbinder has written: "The camera is always on the move in the film; just like the people it moves round, it pretends that something is actually happening.... The tracking shots in the film, the crane shots, the pans! Douglas Sirk looks at these corpses with such tenderness and radiance that we start to think that something must be at fault if these people are so screwed up and, nevertheless, so nice. The fault lies with fear and loneliness. I have rarely felt fear and loneliness so much as in this film..."