Three Comrades

Frank Borzage is little known today.  But he was an important and influential director during the late Silent period and made many estimable films in the thirties and forties.  According to David
Thomson, Borzage ended his career with an unbroken succession of films that were either bad or forgettable (the exception is his 1948 Moonrise) -- as a result, there was a bad odor around his name when he died:  audiences knew him as a studio hack.  In fact, memories are short:  Borzage won the first Academy Award ever bestowed for Best Picture for 1927's Seventh Heaven; he won another Academy Award a few years later for Bad Girl  (1931 Best Director). Another reason for Borzage's eclipse is that his most memorable films are all intense melodramas -- a genre once derided as "woman's pictures", and, generally, without honor among film critics (who have been mostly men -- and I include the formidable Pauline Kael in this assessment.)  Modern film criticism authorizes melodrama only when it is "ironic" -- as in Sirk and Fassbinder; Borzage plays melodrama straight and so may be an acquired taste for some viewers.

Three Comrades (1938) is adapted from a novel by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque (best known for Im Westen Nicht Neues -- All Quiet on the Western Front).  The film was written, in part, by F. Scott Fitzgerald and there is a distinct quality to the dialogue that seems characteristic of the American novelist -- the characters are all wonderfully gallant, cynical, and doomed and they express themselves in pithy aphorisms.  The film is excellent if, perhaps, too sad to be entertaining -- it's a three- or four-hankie weeper and I defy any one of my readers to watch this picture without getting a little moist at its climax.  The three comrades are hardened World War One veterans struggling to survive in Weimar Germany.  Gottfried (Robert Young) has somehow retained his idealism; he seems to be a socialist.  Erich (Robert Taylor) is an earnest everyman and the film's romantic lead.  Otto (Franchot Tone) is a crack mechanic:  at the outset of the film, he learns that his fighter plane, "Baby" ( it's marked with a tag showing a noble-looking Dachshund) is going to be disassembled on the morrow and, so, unable to bear the insult to the faithful machine, Otto throws a grenade in the cockpit and blows it up.  Later, Otto's prowess as a mechanic and driver, piloting his sedan (also called "Baby") is key to the film's plot.  The three war buddies open a garage and repair cars for a living.  All is not well in Germany -- we see glimpses of street violence and Gottfried is involved with some subversive left-wing elements who are battling right wing thugs.  Gottfried, in order to devote his time to the garage business, abandons his affiliation with the Leftist groups -- but it doesn't avail him in the end.  Otto declares that the trauma of war has left alive only Erich -- he and Gottfried are already dead, casualties of the conflagration. 

One day while racing along rural roads, Otto and the boys get into a road race with a fat, nasty industrialist, Herr Brewer.  Brewer is trounced.  He has riding with him a beautiful young woman, Patricia played by Maureen Sullavan.  Erich asks Patricia out on a date.  She's the heiress to a fortune lost in the war and the film suggests that she's Herr Brewer's kept woman.  In any event, Erich falls in love with her and they marry.  Patricia has been concealing from the three comrades that she suffers from tuberculosis.  On her honeymoon, the tuberculosis returns and she almost bleeds to death -- Otto has to drive "Baby" at 95 miles an hour to reach the seaside resort with a terrified doctor in tow.  The doctor tells Otto that Patricia must be hospitalized in  a sanitarium as soon as it is cold in October.  Although Patricia doesn't want to be separated from Otto, at last, she agrees to enter the Sanitarium in the Alps.  Things don't go well with her and a gruesome-sounding operation is scheduled -- something about grafting spinal bones into her decaying rib cage.  Back in the city, there's more fighting and an assassin guns down Gottfried.  Otto implacably seeks revenge and, finally, kills the assassin.  By this time, Patricia is dying.  Erich visits her in the sanitarium where she tries to be gay and nonchalant but knows that she is doomed.  Otto sells "Baby" to finance the operation which the audience suspects will not go well.  No one dares tell Patricia that Gottfried has been killed -- although she intuits his death.  After the surgery, Patricia is told that she can't move at all or the results will be fatal.  When Erich bids farewell to Otto, Patricia staggers out of bed, waves goodbye to them, and, then, falls down dead.  At her grave, Otto and Erich vow to go to South America -- the film features a running gag about Erich lying about adventures that he supposedly had in Rio and the Amazon.  We hear gunfire.  One of two men gravely announces:  "There's fighting in the city," the film's last scrap of dialogue.  We see the two walking away from the cemetery with ghostly versions of Patricia and Gottfried at their sides. 

The film is brilliantly, if obtrusively, written.  Patricia yearns for a life in a different era:  "One of reason and contentment."  Erich replies:  "This minute is enough."  The film exploits various leit motifs -- Erich's lying about South America becomes, by the film's end, a vision of heaven, a paradise in which the friends will be reunited.  Patricia has a silver evening gown that serves as an important symbol in several scenes, although it never loses its slinky physical allure as well.  Otto's relentless pursuit of Gottfried's smirking assassin has a nightmarish quality -- in the final shoot out that takes place in a squalid snow-covered alleyway, each shot knocks down little avalanches of snow.  There's an image of Patricia as she bleeds from the hemorrhage that is truly awful -- we see one supplicant eye while the rest of her face is covered in some kind of coarse burlap.  There are innumerable poignant or memorable details -- at their wedding, Guy Kibbe as Alfons, the avuncular host of a tavern that the characters frequent, orders a feast of pork chops, platters piled high with the meat.  Earlier, Alfons has boasted about a wonderful pig that he says "I killed myself".  Patricia praises him as a man "who really appreciates meat."  Everyone drinks all the time and half of the characters are always drunk.  A maimed war veteran in Alfons' tavern keeps the date by recalling battles in the war -- they are more important to him than birthdays.  When the dying Patricia hears the tick-tock of Erich's watch, she cries out and he flings the watch away in horror.  Borzage probably could have been a first-rate action director -- he stages the scenes of street violence with appalling authority and several of the road-race sequences involving "Baby" have hair-raising images..  In this kind of film, trick-shots have a sort of dream-like intensity -- during Erich and Patricia's honeymoon, they embrace on a beach.  Their hotel is painted on the lens as a matte-effect -- it appears an inaccessible Gothic redoubt on a promontory.  Of course, the inaccessible quality of this haven is the whole point -- they can see it but can't really get to it.  A movie like this is not to everyone's taste and there are aspects of the film that are overblown and, even, ridiculous -- but the film isn't afraid to jerk tears from its viewers and succeeds in this endeavor and, by and large, the acting and direction are beyond reproach.  There isn't a dull frame in the film.