Filmed in the high MGM style, this polished tragic romance stars Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone and Robert Young as Germans having a rough time in the 1920s Weimar Republic, while Margaret Sullavan’s disillusioned beauty succumbs to a dreaded Movie Disease. It is also a prime example of the negative effect of Hollywood’s Production Code. MGM wanted the name value of Erich Maria Remarque’s best seller, but not his message: conservative politics forbade any mention of (shhh!)   Nazis.   It’s still a very good movie, but it needs to be known that its content was changed to please a Nazi influencer.

Three Comrades
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1938 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 98 min. / Street Date May 27, 2025 / Available at MovieZyng / 24.99
Starring: Robert Taylor, Margaret Sullavan, Franchot Tone, Robert Young, Guy Kibbee, Lionel Atwill, Henry Hull, Charley Grapewin, Monty Woolley, Henry Brandon, George Chandler, Hal Le Sueur, Marjorie Main, George Offerman Jr., Sarah Padden, Frank Reicher, George Zucco.
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art Director: Cedric Gibbons
Montages: Slavko Vorkapich
Film Editor: Frank Sullivan
Music Composer: Franz Waxman
Screenplay by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edward E. Paramore Jr. from the book by Erich Maria Remarque
Produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Directed by Frank Borzage

German writer Erich Maria Remarque penned the highly influential  All Quiet on the Western Front, which became the pacifist plea in the years between the wars. Hitler banned Remarque, who continued to write and publish in exile. Three more Remarque books were made into movies in the years leading up to the Second World War. Universal’s  The Road Back was a prestige production directed by James Whale — and then partly re-shot to appease German representatives. Hollywood studios did not want to lose revenue from the German market.

Much the same happened with MGM’s production Three Comrades, although the political neutering wasn’t accomplished with re-takes. The 1936 novel was instead altered in pre-production, by Joseph Breen of the Production Code Office, through direct influence by Germany itself.

Like The Road Back, Three Comrades is an unofficial sequel to All Quiet: soldiers returning from the war fronts have difficulty making ends meet in a postwar Germany suffering an economic collapse. The difference is that Three Comrades was written when the Nazis were firmly in power. Although the story takes place several years earlier, the fascist movement is already strong.

MGM promoted the film using cover art from Remarque’s book. But the movie prioritizes sentimental romance over Remarque’s main theme. The chaos in Germany remains a background for the love story between stars Robert Taylor and Margaret Sullavan. Director Frank Borzage excelled with tender romances —  Bad Girl,  Man’s Castle,  History is Made at Night,  Moonrise. His finale for Three Comrades is almost as operatic as that of his earlier Hemingway adaptation  A Farewell to Arms.  Shaping Three Comrades into another Borzage weepie was a good business move for MGM — it was very successful.

Defeat for Germany leaves a trio of young German officers celebrating the peace and saluting their fallen comrades-in-arms. Pilot Otto Koster (Franchot Tone) must burn his airplane ‘Baby’ but toasts the future with his close pals Erich Lohkamp (Robert Taylor) and Gottfried Lenz (Robert Young). They start a repair garage and taxi service business but find it rough going. Gottfried becomes associated with activist politics. He must help his pamphlet-publishing friend Dr. Heinrich Becker (Henry Hull) in secret because ultra-patriotic thugs (?) dominate the streets. They must fight for repair business against thugs that wreck their taxi. To relax, the friends zoom down the country roads in Otto’s souped-up personal car, a new ‘Baby.’  . A road race with the aristocrat Breuer (Lionel Atwill) ends at a country eatery, where Erich meets Breuer’s beautiful companion. She’s Patricia Hollmann (Margaret Sullavan), a dispossessed aristocrat who hides a serious health problem.

The romance between Erich and Pat builds slowly, mainly because Erich considers himself too poor for her. An attempt to accompany Pat to a concert and nightclub fails when his improvised tuxedo self-destructs. Otto and Gottfried encourage the two to marry despite Pat’s possible health issues. But she collapses on their honeymoon, and Erich finds out the severity of her condition. Pat must take serious rest in a sanitarium, just as the mobs in the street become more violent.

As a ‘weepy’ in the Hollywood mold, Three Comrades is certainly efficient. Robert Taylor is charming and Margaret Sullavan fresh and appealing. Her close-ups in the sanitarium compete for poignancy with those of  Greta Garbo. The bittersweet finale is exceptionally well directed by Borzage. Under orders to stay absolutely still while recuperating from a risky operation, Sullavan’s Pat makes a ‘selfless’ gesture that works as poetry, even if it will only make everyone unhappy.

(Spoiler)  The idea seems to be that Pat doesn’t want the comrades to keep sacrificing for her, as when Otto sells ‘Baby’ to finance her big operation. Her choice not to give her own recovery a chance comes from Erich Maria Remarque’s downbeat attitude.

MGM’s telling doesn’t communicate fully why Pat is so negative on Life itself. There’s talk of poverty but very little on screen. Nobody seems to be starving. The boys joke about their finances but can zip around the countryside in a 1922 version of a hot rod. Otto twice comes to the rescue, racing ‘Baby’ long distances to help Pat. On one trip he carries a terrified doctor (Monty Woolley). Erich’s humiliation over the tuxedo that falls apart hasn’t the sting of social inferiority. It feels almost like a scene from a Harold Lloyd comedy, with the laughs turned cruel.

The film also has little flavor for its German setting. There are no German accents and the street hooliganism has been shorn of ideology proto- National Socialist emblems. There is no mention of runaway inflation or the struggling German democracy, the Weimar Republic. Ditto the crippling terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty — the only hint of that comes when Otto must burn his beloved fighter plane, a reasonable dictate to a defeated enemy.

A strong account of the political influence directed at Three Comrades is covered in Steven J. Ross’s well-researched exposé of Germany’s covert plots against Hollywood,  Hitler in Los Angeles. The German government’s’ Vice Counsul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, maintained cordial social connections in the mid- 1930s. He also organized pro-German groups and a full spy network of spies. Gyssling paid local contacts (including a brother of actor Victor McLaglen) to bring him information about upcoming productions.

All of Erich Maria Remarque’s books were banned by Hitler. Gyssling found out about the proposed movie adaptation for Three Comrades early in its development, and used his diplomatic clout to secure confidential meetings at MGM. With the implication that all of MGM’s films might be banned from Germany, Louis B. Mayer and producer Joseph Mankiewicz agreed to temper negative comment toward Germany.

Going easy on Germany was primarily an economic move, not a political one … except that a Nazi was quietly dictating the content of American movies. MGM wouldn’t have wanted that news to get out. In 1937-37 isolationists (and quasi-Fascists) held sway in Washington. The same conservatives opposed to resisting fascism in Spain also thought of Hollywood as dominated by ‘Jewish’ interests. Despite increasingly alarming news from Germany, Hollywood mostly refrained from commenting on Hitler’s brutal regime and obvious military ambitions. It wasn’t until 1939 that Warners dared release the openly anti-Nazi  Confessions of a Nazi Spy.

According to Steven Ross, Gyssling’s influence managed major consessions for Three Comrades:

It was Breen’s Production Code Office that mandated the changes. The only resistance on the part of the MGM producer, according to Ross, was refusing Gyssling’s request that the film’s villainous street hooligans be identified as Communists. It’s a situation we well understand, using threats to impose an alternate, fully false version of reality. The ‘apolitical’ Production Code censor sided with the Nazis.  ^*

The Production Code’s idea of non-political morality comes into play when one of our comrades, to directly avenge a killing, stalks and shoots dead the thug responsible. Because the thug fired first, it is rationalized as self-defense … but our guy forced him into a corner with an obvious intent to kill. Vigilante justice gets a green light. That is the kind of twisted morality that ‘clever’ writers were compelled to employ under the Production Code.

Three Comrades was made by some of Hollywood’s most prestigious talent. It’s the only credited film of the famed author F. Scott Fitzgerald, although it is said that producer Joseph Mankiewicz rewrote much of the dialogue. Supervising art director Cedric Gibbons took a sole credit, as he did with some of the more prestigious MGM productions. Slavko Vorkapich is credited with montages, although we mainly see simple split-screens to depict long-distance phone calls.

Robert Taylor and Margaret Sullavan have great chemistry, despite the MGM halo that places their relationship on a level above sordid physical sex. The script frames its male trio as heroes in a noble fraternal bond. But only one of them has a (depicted) interest in women. All three are devoted to Pat even though Erich is the trio’s designated lover. Sorry revisionists, there doesn’t appear to be a crumb trail of clues interpretable as gay subtext. They’re just good neutered pals, rooting for Erich from the sidelines.

Some of the smaller casting hints at editorial deletions, either for time or to drop material to appease Herr Gyssling. Henry Hull gets major billing despite being on-screen for barely more than a minute: did his activist once make pro-democratic speeches?  Wearing an eye patch, Henry Brandon ( The Searchers’ war chief Scar) is an ex-soldier singled out for threatening looks early on. We expect him to return to perhaps menace somebody, but his character is later dropped. The abbreviated appearances of Frank Reicher and George Zucco can be explained by the filmmakers wanting to concentrate on the central romance. Slavko Vorkapich’s credited contribution is so slight, we wonder if he might have edited elaborate montages to illustrate the facts of postwar Germany, for scenes that were then dropped.

The film made good use of MGM’s glamorous stars, and reaped a bounty at the box office. Audiences were moved by the writing and direction of the tragic finale. Frank Borzage’s direction and Margaret Sullavan’s performance gives the scene genuine power, avoiding clichés that might tip over into laughter. Ms. Sullavan would portray martyrs to Fascism in two more movies that were likely considered ‘prematurely anti-Fascist’ … Frank Borzage’s  The Mortal Storm and John Cromwell’s  So Ends Our Night.

Later film adaptations of Erich Maria Remarque’s works weren’t as successful. The excellent  So Ends Our Night was made in 1941, when the Production Code (and the U.S. Congress) finally permitted negative depictions of Nazi Germany. It’s from the book Flotsam, about Europeans rendered stateless by the German conquest, who become refugees fleeing from one country to another. The postwar (1948)  Arch of Triumph was a flop that sank a highly creative independent company, Enterprise Productions. A decade after that, Remarque’s  A Time to Love and a Time to Die was filmed in CinemaScope by Douglas Sirk. We’re still awaiting a disc release for that one. Is a rights conflict the problem?  Kino Lorber and Criterion have between them released almost every Sirk movie made at Universal.

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of Three Comrades is the expected prime-quality remaster of this Golden-Era MGM production. Filmed almost completely on interior sound stages, the show has MGM’s polished, artifical gloss. The many sets don’t reflect Remarque’s impression of economic depression — we spend more time in restaurants than in the boys’ tiny repair shop. Pat’s loss of her position and property is represented by showing her living in a smaller set of rooms in Herr Breuer’s palatial mansion …. her grand piano doesn’t fit, and has been left blocking an access door.

(Spoiler)  Franz Waxman’s music score includes a drinking song, and at one point Erich plays the piano for a sing-along. The music rises nicely for the final curtain call shot, that ‘optimistically’ sees the surviving friends marching with the ghosts of their deceased comrades. But no Yoda or Obi-wan Kenobi.

The WAC includes an original trailer in decent shape, and un-remastered, weak transfers of two MGM short subjects, a Robert Benchley comedy directed by Roy Rowland, and ‘An Historical Mystery’ directed by Jacques Tourneur. After four feature films in France, Tourneur directed 16 short subjects for MGM before advancing to features.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Three Comrades
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good +
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Short subject How to Raise a Baby
Short subject The Face Behind the Mask
Original trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: June 11, 2025
(7312comr)

^*  We often read the opinion that the Production Code improved movies by forcing clever writers to indirectly imply risqué things that the Code forbade, leading to classic movie scenes. Well, good writers implied things even in the pre-Code era. What really was happening was the control of religious and political content by conservative commisars.

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