Three Comrades (1938)
With The Great Gatsby surprisingly raking in over fifty million dollars on its opening weekend, I guess it’s here to stay, for a little while anyway. Which means that I may end up seeing it. But didn’t I swear that I would never again see a Baz Luhrmann movie? I still haven’t recovered from that sustained horror known as Moulin Rouge! And don’t get me started on Australia. So, if I actually plunk down money to see it (in 3-D, no less), am I more of a masochist than I ever suspected? Maybe I’m just hungry for a big movie with big stars and a glamorous period setting, not to mention an adaptation of an American literary classic. I seem determined to hate myself in the morning. But, whether I end up seeing it or not, this fourth big-screen Gatsby has certainly brought F. Scott Fitzgerald’s name into the pop culture of the 21st century. (Thank you, Leo DiCaprio.) For me, it’s an opportunity to remind movie lovers of Fitzgerald’s only credited screenplay from his few years at MGM in the late 1930s. (He died from a heart attack at age 44 in 1940.)
Three Comrades was certainly a prestige project: produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz; directed by two-time Oscar winner Frank Borzage; starring the much-admired Margaret Sullavan and a top-billed post-Camille Robert Taylor; based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front); and with a script co-credited to Fitzgerald and Edward E. Paramore. Set in Germany, it’s one of those between-the-wars dramas, a “lost generation” movie. It may not be one of Borzage’s more distinctive movies, such as 7th Heaven (1927), A Farewell to Arms (1932), or Desire (1936), but it’s nonetheless lovingly made and occasionally rather touching. It’s best at handling the malaise and hopelessness of its post-WWI “lost” figures, while less good at charting the rise of those brutes who would soon come to be known as Nazis. The film’s blatant subtext is the events going on in Europe at the time the film was made, the dawn of the Nazis’ march through the continent.
The film opens on Armistice Day in 1918, as the title’s soldier buddies (Mr. Taylor, Franchot Tone, and Robert Young) begin their post-war transition. But the action mainly takes place in 1920, with increasing rumblings of violent unrest. The guys go into business together, owning and operating a garage, working as both mechanics and cabbies. Young is the most politically active, the most fiercely against the new post-war bullies. (In a real twist, Young plays a fervent Nazi in The Mortal Storm, a 1940 war-themed drama also directed by Borzage and starring Sullavan.) The subplot, concerning Young’s activism and Tone’s subsequent involvement on Young’s behalf, is never as convincing or compelling as the main plotline (which focuses on Sullavan). Mr. Tone is partly to blame. He gives one of his tirelessly overemphatic performances, as if he wants to show us how hard he worked on each and every one of his line readings.
The film’s chief asset is inarguably Ms. Sullavan. First seen wearing a beret (and looking sensational in it), Sullavan was never more attractive, despite playing a dying girl. She’s a fallen aristocrat, once rich and now poor, half-English and half-German, and apparently being “kept” by Lionel Atwill. She’s a defeatist not entirely without hope, unmistakably marked by a sadness with which she now drifts through life. Call her a walking casualty of the war, seemingly without a future. Her tuberculosis is in remission but it will return. All this adds up to a luminous Sullavan performance, one of enormous delicacy, a kind of brave fragility. And it’s completely unforced, enhanced by subtle shades of feeling and a heartbreaking tenderness. Because of her charm and warmth, it’s easy to believe that all three guys quickly adore her. But it’s she and Taylor who fall in love. Though she confesses the truth of her condition to Tone, she marries Taylor without telling him how ill she is. When she coughs at 44 minutes into the movie, well, you know where this is going. (For Taylor, it’s Camille all over again.) She doesn’t want to drag down the “comrades,” or hold Taylor back from living a full life, all of which leads to the moving sacrificial ending.
The only flaw in Sullavan’s performance has nothing to do with her acting. It’s the overglamorization inflicted upon her by MGM. She’s always too made up, always glossily lipsticked no matter how sick she gets. Despite the film’s dramatic (and cosmetic) flaws, Three Comrades is an undeniably affecting movie. Sullavan received her only Best Actress Oscar nomination for this performance (losing to Bette Davis in Jezebel), and she won the New York Film Critics Award that year.
If the latest Great Gatsby doesn’t put you in a Fitzgerald mood or state of mind, then Three Comrades and Margaret Sullavan will very likely do the trick.
