OVP: Three Comrades (1938)

Film: Three Comrades (1938)

Stars: Robert Taylor, Margaret Sullavan, Franchot Tone, Robert Young

Director: Frank Borzage

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actress-Margaret Sullavan)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Hey there!  First off, I want to say sorry about the relatively scant offerings on the blog over the past two weeks.  A combination of events both expected (and welcomed) and unexpected (and less welcomed) kept me busy with real world events, and as a result, I've been unable to do much writing beyond our Saturdays with the Stars series.  I am hopeful that we'll be able to get some semblance of normal, though in the next week or two we'll likely be a bit more sporadic before we settle back into our daily routine.  Today, we're going to get back into at least something of a groove by looking at another film from 1938 (I'm not sure of the exact date of when I can reveal why we've been focusing so much on 1938 lately, but there is a reason & I'm hopeful I'll be able to share it by the end of the month) and with a unique film not because of its actors or its director, but because of its writer.  Three Comrades is the only film to ever be written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most influential novelists of the 20th Century.  I enjoy Fitzgerald's look at the anguish of modern life, and have a particular sense of pride that he's from my home state, so I was curious what a man who has written a lot of novelists that are basically pronounced as "unfilmable" would do with his sole cinematic output.

(Spoilers Ahead) Three Comrades is the story of three soldiers, Erich (Taylor), Otto (Tone), and Gottfried (Young) and their time in the years coming up toward World War II (though obviously made in 1938, they don't know that's about to break out, neither character nor actor).  The movie largely focuses on their movements as they try to battle fascism in Germany, while also each of them being drawn to a young woman named Patricia (Sullavan), who ultimately lands on Erich (Robert Taylor is the lead for a reason) as her primary love interest, but there's a catch: Patricia is dying from tuberculosis, and as a result their romance has a tragic sell-by date.  Still, they continue on, and we see their struggles to keep their romance alive while also seeing the cost of fighting against the Nazis & the toll it takes on the friendship (it won't be just Patricia who dies in this movie) before the film comes to its inevitable, melancholy fate.

The film is quite melodramatic, and the direction initially is off-putting.  All of the figures are meant to be playing Germans, set against the rise of fascism in World War II, but all of the main actors are American, and none of them attempt an accent.  This is particularly galling for Taylor, who speaks in a deeply Midwestern intonation and is an odd fit for this story (which is weird, because Robert Taylor with his curt demeanor and intense handsomeness, was always at-home in melodramas).  The film's politics (all taking place on the eve of World War II) also feel strange in how insightful they are, showing the growing discord ravaging the European continent.

But the film works-I liked it.  Fitzgerald knows story structure, and isn't afraid to have his characters dying to serve the story (note the plural-as I mentioned above several characters die here), and Sullavan's work is strangely effective.  Other than Shop Around the Corner I didn't know a lot about her as a performer, and I found her deeply-affected work here quite transportive.  She plays Patricia as a woman who knows she's doomed, but has fallen in love anyway (perhaps with all three men in her way).  This sort of romantic figure could be frustrating, but I think she gives her a wide-eyed pessimism that I liked.  Patricia in her hands is less a victim of circumstance and more someone who doesn't want to be a saint.  In a different life she was the gay life force of a party, not the woman stuck in a disease that will claim her...and she knows that the illness has affected her ability to be that person, forcing her to choose the life of a martyr.  It's delicate stuff, and sometimes too much (the death scene is overly dramatic, and perhaps too indulgent though it worked on me), but Three Comrades is a great time, and she bolsters it.