I reviewed Frank Borzage's The Three Comrades (1938) in May 2020. Then, I seem to have promptly forgotten that I saw the picture. I watched Little Man, What Now? a couple nights ago, was disappointed by that 1934 Borzage adaptation of the famous Fallada novel, but admired Maureen Sullavan's performance in the movie and, so, was impelled to seek out the later picture, also starring that actress, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and also an adaptation of a best-selling German novel, in this case by Erich Maria Remarque. After a few minutes, it was apparent to me that I had seen The Three Comrades before and, of course, written a comment on the picture, although I have to confess that I couldn't recall anything about the plot. What's interesting to me on second viewing are the parts of the film that seemed immediately familiar to me, that is, the elements of the mise-en-scene that I remembered -- images that embedded themselves, as it were, in my imagination. The road-races with the sleek car, "Baby" as it is called, were parts of the movie that I remembered vividly although the motivations for those wild chases (Pat's tuberculosis and, nearly, fatal hemorrhage) eluded me. I recalled the cafe and bar run by Alfons (Guy Kibbe, a wonderful mixture of melancholy and joviality)), the host's love for choral music, and the layout of the set. The fan of marble steps leading to Erich's flat where the heroine waits for her lover until dawn, crouched disconsolately by the wall of the building in her evening gown, said to be like a "silver torch" (a Fitzgerald touch), remained with me as did the tear-jerking climax. Curiously, some important aspects of the movie that I now found impressive and, therefore, perhaps memorable seem to have escaped my attention earlier. The fatal exchange of stares between a thug who shoots the idealistic (and probably Communist) Gottfried and Gottfried's avenger, Otto, is startling, a brilliant example of crosscutting with the villain smirking at first, and, then, becoming panicked as he sees the hatred in Otto's glare. The scene in which Otto catches up with the murderer at night, hunting him down in Baby's headlights, and, then, tracking him into an alley is a marvelous piece of film-making on which I didn't earlier comment: a choir is singing the Hallelujah chorus by Handel (it's Chrismas Eve) and Otto chases the man to the church steps, then, hounds him into the bitterly cold alley, a sort of icy ravine all clad in spectral snow where he guns him down -- this is marvelous stuff on which I didn't write two years ago and which I apparently forgot entirely. (The scene was unfamiliar to me when it appeared on screen.) The amount of drinking in the movie is startling, probably, attributable to a masculine ethos of the era in which heroes got themselves drunk to assuage their grief -- but, of course, unavoidably associated with Fitzgerald's work on the script, of course, although to what extent he actually wrote the lines about boozing is unclear to me. (Apparently, the script that he wrote had to be extensively doctored.) I recalled the weird seaside resort from the first viewing, obviously a painted refuge next to a painted sea. The bitter ending line of the movie --"There's fighting in the City" -- remained with me as prophetic of the Second World War although I didn't recall the creepy ghosts of the dead comrades (Pat and Gottfried) appearing to escort the survivors toward the gloomy black-and-white sunrise. (Or is it a sunset?) Maureen Sullavan remains impressive -- she's emaciated to the point of being skeletal and her uncanny slenderness seems more morbid to me on second viewing, a kind of horrific special effect. At the end of the film, she lies in bed, dying of tuberculosis, an effigy of herself, a mere linear rail covered in white sheets without flesh it seems, her bright face a geometry of round eyes and pointed bone -- all of this seemed very effective to me, but disturbing as well. (The scene in which she suffers the hemorrhage and peeps out from under a veil of sheet, just a lunar eye staring into the camera, is also unsettling.) At one point, there's a close-up image of her rib cage -- the doctors are plotting the removal of one of her ribs and the intentional deflating of her lung -- reminds me that after World War One, every small town in America and Europe had two or three war veterans who had been gassed in battle and whose respiratory systems had been inalterably comprised -- wheezing, hacking ghosts left over from the Great War. The film transposes this fate onto its heroine -- she represents the legions of veterans with ruined lungs, gasping out their lives in the aftermath of the catastrophe. It's a weird sort of displacement; the heroine is made to suffer for the wounded soldiers. (We're told that it was malnutrition that first afflicted her with TB and she 's said to be a ruined aristocrat.) The scene in which Erich visits her in her half-abandoned palace where she now rents a room from the loathsome Breuer is also astonishing -- he opens the wrong door and finds his access to the woman's suite barred by a grand piano, the last vestige of her former wealth; to enter the room, he doesn't go to the side-door but just scrambles under the hulking catafalque of the piano. The movie operates according to a sort of duality -- there is the stasis of those mired forever in the war (exemplified by a bitter veteran with an eyepatch who celebrates in Alfons' pub the anniversaries of famous battles) and the urge to propel one's self into the future, away from the calamities of the past. Baby, the airplane that Otto destroys at the end of the first scene, a drinking party on the night of the Armistice, later reincarnated as Otto's speedy, super-charged sedan, seems to epitomize the urge to forget the War, to move past its miseries, and to fully inhabit the future. When Pat rises from her bed, knowing that this last gesture will be fatal to her, the camera adopts a disorienting vertical perspective. We hear Wagner's Liebestod on the soundtrack, and, then, the heroine staggers toward the window-terrace of the sanitarium, knowing that this movement will kill her. For those mired in the war and its calamities, motion away from the conflict turns out to be lethal. When the wind surges around her emaciated body, stirring the white linen in which she is enshrouded, she falls down and dies. I recalled that the movie had a tear-jerking finale, but, for the life of me, I had no idea of what it was about or how it was staged. Indeed, I see from perusing my earlier note, that I admired the climax and said that it would likely move viewers to tears. I still believe this to be true. But why did the vibrant, living memory of the film fade so quickly from my imagination?
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