Three Comrades (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Aug 05, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Frank BorzageRelease Date(s)
1938 (May 27, 2025)Studio(s)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: C+
Review
As an adaptation by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edward Paramore, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, Three Comrades (1938) makes for a deeply frustrating viewing experience. Frank Borzage’s direction, particularly of the actors, is excellent: Margaret Sullavan is scintillating throughout, and even Robert Taylor, an actor I’ve never cared for at all isn’t bad, while Franchot Tone and Robert Young are terrific throughout.
Conversely, the film reeks of pre-war appeasement—it’s a movie about characters living in Germany during the rise of fascism/Nazism in the early 1920s, in which those things are never once mentioned or identified by name. Like MGM’s subsequent Idiot’s Delight (1939), people make passionate speeches about a political climate only in the vaguest of generalities, never addressing specific issues or political conflicts. To that end, the production pivots to its more generic “weepie” romance aspects, with Sullavan maybe chronically, maybe terminally ill with something also never identified in the typical ‘30s Hollywood manner. Her character has a kind of vague death wish—seemingly because she doesn’t want to be a bother to anyone—but it’s impossible for the viewer or the three comrades of the title to get any handle on her illness because we never learn what it is, what her symptoms (beyond the occasional cough) mean, what her prognosis might be—nothing.
At the end of World War I, disillusioned German fighter pilots Erich Lohkamp (Taylor), Otto Koster (Tone), and Gottfried Lenz (Young) face an uncertain future. They try opening an auto-repair shop but business is lousy, though they always seem to have money for carousing in their custom car, “Baby,” and boozing it up at Alfons’s (Guy Kibbee) drinking joint. Indeed, it’s while on an impromptu vacation (where are they getting all that disposable income?) they meet (apparently) fascist sympathizer Herr Breuer (Lionel Atwill) and his “companion,” Pat Hollmann (Sullavan), an impoverished former aristocrat.
Erich falls hard for Pat, but ashamed of his social status relative to hers, doesn’t pursue a relationship at first. Encouraged by his pals, particularly Otto, also clearly smitten by Pat, the two fall in love and the foursome become inseparable. However, Pat’s mysterious, lingering illness—Wikipedia’s plot synopsis calls it tuberculosis, though it’s never called that in the film—stands in the way of their happiness. (In the novel it’s a lung hemorrhage brought on by malnutrition during the war.) She’s placed in a sanitorium (the head doctor is played by George Zucco—Uh oh!) and the three men try to raising money for her long-term care.
Sullavan, best remembered for The Shop Around the Corner, is similarly luminous here, giving a delicate, naturalistic performance: at one point one of the characters says something along the lines that she looks like she’d blow away in a light breeze, and that accurately describes how Sullavan plays her. Taylor, usually a one-note actor despite his long popularity and association with MGM, is unexpectedly rather good, showing a sensitive side he rarely exhibited in other pictures. Indeed, all of the performances are no worse than good, and Borzage shows imagination not only in the way he blocks his actors but in the handful of action scenes, his choice of angles and the cutting together of these scenes are mostly excellent.
Although by 1938 Remarque was writing in exile and Three Comrades wouldn’t even be published in Germany until 1951, MGM apparently still had hopes of releasing the film there, and acquiesced when approached by slippery German representatives to their request for script changes while the film was in pre-production. The result is a 1920s Germany with no swastikas, no Nazis, no anti-Semitism, no Brownshirts, and no mention of Adolph Hitler. Indeed, the Germans went so far as to request that the far-right mobs beating up the leftist protesters be identified as Communists, one of the few “requests” made that MGM turned down. Further, the Germany of MGM’s film has none of the runaway inflation, rampant unemployment and poverty that fueled the rise of Nazism. Everyone seems well-fed, and far less desperate than even the chorines in your average Warner Bros. musical. When Henry Hull, playing a leftist physician, makes a big speech in the town square, it’s utterly meaningless: What’s he protesting against? Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is still gripping 95 years after it was made because of its unblinking, uncompromised account of Germany during the First World War. By contrast, Three Comrades is as sanitized as Tarzan’s New York Adventure, with about the same political weight.
Likewise, Sullavan’s character and her medical condition make little sense. Other than the occasional light cough and a couple of dizzy spells, she appears perfectly healthy. At the sanatorium, Zucco’s medico assures Pat that a routine operation to remove a rib (why?) will cure her, but her recovery depends upon her lying still in her hospital bed for two weeks, which is far more than she can bear (again, why?). The film implies it’s because she doesn’t want to burden Erich with the cost and bother of a long recovery, but this only makes her seem irrational.
What’s left after all this compromising is a well-acted, handsomely directed production with all the substance of marzipan. Yet, from a purely commercial standpoint MGM’s concessions worked: the film was a big hit, though presumably not released in Germany until after the war, for all of MGM and the Production Code’s tampering.
Warner Archive’s Blu-ray presents the black-and-white film in its original 1.37:1 aspect ratio, the image very good if a wee bit on the soft side. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is likewise very good, and supported by optional English subtitles on this Region-Free disc.
Given the film tumultuous history it’s disappointing the release is light on extras that have little to do with the main feature. Two short subjects, How to Raise a Baby (featuring Robert Benchley) and The Face Behind the Mask (directed by Jacques Tourneur) are okay shorts though both are presented via blah video transfers presumably up-rezzed from standard definition. An original theatrical trailer is a bit more interesting, but it’s hard to generate any excitement about these unimaginative extra choices.
Three Comrades was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s only screenplay credit, and for its fine acting and direction, as well as a piece of Hollywood history prior to World War II, the film is of interest, but overall it’s also very disappointing.
- Stuart Galbraith IV