Three Comrades

Perhaps the most significant thing about Frank Borzage's 1938 film, Three Comrades, is that is the only film credited to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, it is an interesting if superficial look at Germany between the wars, albeit with American actors.

Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone, and Robert Young are three German soldiers and friends. The film begins with the end of the war. The three buddies start an auto repair shop together. One day they are out driving in the country and meet a young woman (Margaret Sullavan). Taylor is smitten, and they begin a romance. Meanwhile, Young is involved in a political organization that is resistant to the burgeoning right-wing movement that will become the Nazi Party.

The dialogue, presumably Fitzgerald's, is snappy and erudite. I particularly like a scene when Taylor tells Sullavan about his non-existent travels in South America. The three of them together are always quipping, like a proto-Rat Pack (they also do a lot of drinking).

It's a good film aside from moments of excess sentimentality (the ending, which includes ghostly figures of the dead and choir music is way too much). Other scenes our handled much better by Borzage, especially a scene in which Tone, exacting revenge, tracks a man through snowy streets and shoots him outside a church, from which the Hallelujah Chorus can be heard.

There is another aspect that I found kind of creepy. Taylor marries Sullavan, but it's as if she married all three men. The other two dote on her, kiss her on the lips, and pretty much go everywhere she and Taylor go. Don't Tone and Young have love lives of their own? It plays almost like polyamory.

Sullavan received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. I don't think I'd ever seen her before (she made only 16 films) and might now be more famous for being one of Henry Fonda's wives. She's very interesting here, almost as if she were another plane. When you first hear her cough you know what's going to happen yet she avoids some of the cliches of the dying woman type.

All in all, Three Comrades is worth seeing, if only for the depiction of friendship as it ought to be (more than it really is).