"Three Comrades" was one of the few films on which F. Scott Fitzgerald got a writing credit. He co-wrote it with Edward E Paramore Jr from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque who wrote "All Quiet on the Western Front" and it's a beautiful job of work. It's set in Germany after the First World War, (you'll have no trouble accepting the American cast as Germans), and is about three friends, (Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone and Robert Young), and their relationship with a frivolous, sophisticated and dying girl. She's played magnificently by Margaret Sullavan, (she won the New York Film Critic's prize for Best Actress), and she's the lynchpin of this Frank Borzage classic which is deeply romantic and highly intelligent at the same time. It's a love story that doesn't shy away from the political situation pertaining in Germany at the time without ever being preachy. Indeed, it's one of the great films about friendship and it's very easy to accept Taylor, Tone and Young as men who really care for one another, (Tone is superb and even Taylor and Young don't let the side down), but this is Sullavan's movie. It's a luminous performance, perhaps her finest. Her disappearance from the movies and tragically early death was one of the cinema's greatest losses.
Review of Three Comrades
