MovieChat Forums > Pink Angels Discussion > PA: the good and the bad

PA: the good and the bad


---------------
Good
---------------

Great early-70's folk/country soundtrack. The music alone makes Pink Angels worth multiple viewings.

Appealing characters (and the actors who played them). It looks like the people making this movie had a lot of fun, and that fun infects the viewer.

I love the filmmaker's use of local non-actors reacting to (or interacting with) our heroes. Sometimes these are simple insert shots, other times they share the frame and dialogue. In what other movie(s) have you seen such a thing?

Is this the first movie to show "alternative sexual lifestyles" in a positive light (despite the WTF ending)? I know some previous movies dealt with it in coded (Tea and Sympathy, The Children's Hour) ways and derisive (The Detective, Lady in Cement) ways, but in Pink Angels, the 6 'queers' are front-and-center and the putative heroes. No, I guess The Boys in the Band (1970) got there first, but Pink Angels is still in the vanguard.


---------------
Bad
---------------

Neither the screenwriter nor the director seem to know the difference between homosexuality vs. transvestism. Did they really not talk to anybody in the LGBT community (although that moniker hadn't been coined at the time) who could clue them in?

If Pink Angels is trying to promote compassion for those who follow "alternative sexual lifestyles", it loses that focus by sometimes trying to be a compendium of left-wing grievances. Slamming the U.S. military by including the character of "The General" is unnecessary. It would have been more appropriate to make the FBI the villains (they have purview over internal American affairs, where the military doesn't). And although the use of "breaking the 4th wall" (when the black girl looks into the camera and says her "black is . . . " dialogue while Dan Hagerty is atop her) is a playful moment, black-consciousness-raising, too, has nothing to do with the movie's theme.

One of my pet peeves with movies is when an actor (or his film's hair/makeup/wardrobe department) fails to make a total commitment to the role, especially when there would've been zero cost to do so. In Pink Angels, The General has long hair and long sideburns that might have been seen on a civilian adult male circa 1971/72, but were nowhere to be found in the military . . . EVER . . . especially among officers.

reply