Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11664 in VHS
• Released on: 1998-09-01
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Black & White, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 100 minutes

Customer Reviews

An interesting period piece which skirts the real truth
Franchot Tone, Robert Young and Robert Taylor star as three young German friends who survive the rigors of World War One, and stick together as business partners during the economic hard times that followed. In many ways, this is an explicit continuation of the better-known "All Quiet On The Western Front." It is also based on the work of novelist Erich Maria Remarque and also presents an atypically sympathetic view of the Germans who took part in the war (at least of the common soldiers...) This film deals less with the horrors of war than with its social aftermath, and with the collision of Germany's cultural rigidity with an emerging modern world, at times stifling, and at others liberating. Nazism is dealt with somewhat elliptically; one of the three friends is a left-wing idealist and runs afoul of a right-wing mob, leaving the other two to pick up the pieces. Raw stuff for the time, but ultimately not the whole story. The film was decidedly behind its own times: even though open hostilities had not broken out with the German Reich, by the late 1930s World War Two was all but inevitable, and the film's ending, in which our heroes abandon the charred husk of the Old World for the romantic horizons of the New, is simply wishful thinking. By the time this film came out, walking away from the mistakes of the past was hardly an option: the spectre of war had already reared again, and was hardly going to let these young men out of its clutches. Still, if you completely ignore the reality of the times the film was produced in, this succeeds finely as a conventional tragedy-romance. F. Scott Fitzgerald apparently started the script, which was the only screenplay he himself wrote, but it was taken away from him at the last minute, after the producers decided his lofty philosophical musings were too dense to translate into Hollywood boxoffice success.

Great period film.
This is a poignant movie adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel about three life-long friends in post World War I Germany and beautifully filmed by cinematographer and four-time Oscar winner Joseph Ruttenberg ("Waterloo Bridge", "The Philadelphia Story"). I read somewhere that this is a movie that MGM ran into some problems in its production because it was considered by some to be a war-mongering story. For this film version to be approved by the Hollywood production code in 1938, the political presence had to be toned down. Audiences will not see Nazi emblems and mention of Hitler and other Nazi leaders are noticeably absent. Remarque's novel have dealt harshly with the rise of Nazism in Germany in using it as a backdrop for a love story about three ex-soldiers, Erich Lohkamp (played by Robert Taylor) and his wife-to-be Patricia 'Pat' Hollman (Margaret Sullavan), who is dying from tuberculosis...and Erich's two friends, Otto Koster (played by Franchot Tone) and Gottfried Lenz (Robert Young), who share their fondness for Pat. The upheaval that is happening in Germany at that time were adequately represented, although there is no denying that it suffered from the censorship.

This is Margaret Sullavan's movie. The slight and delicate actress had the most convincing performance in this film. She only made sixteen films (not surpirising, since she's really a stage actress) but on all these films she reputedly left an indelible mark on each and every one of them...and that is plain to see here. Director Frank Borzage would light up and close in on her pretty smiling face and her breathy, husky voice would give cheeriness in an otherwise tempestous period.

Ably directed by two-time Academy Award winner Frank Borzage, and with some suitably Teutonic flavored music from multiple Oscar winner Franz Waxman, this is one film genre of the pre WWII period that will always be worthwhile to see.

Germany between the wars in this Remarque "love story"
Erich Maria Remarque's novel receives a first-class treatment from MGM in this 1938 film, which was directed by Frank Borzage from a screenplay by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edward E. Paramore. The "Three Comrades" are three young German soldiers--Erich Lihkamp (Robert Taylor), Otto Koster (Franchot Tone), and Gottfried Lenz (Robert Young)--who are searching for a reason to live in post-World War I Germany. The trio are also bound by their love for Patricia Hollmann (Margaret Sullavan), a young girl dying of tuberculosis. Her illness and the general unrest in Germany combine to dampen the youthful spirits of the three young men in this love story that will remind older people of "La Boheme" and younger ones of "Rent."

I came across "Three Comrades" because I read about its rather infamous "deleted scenes." Fitzgerald's original script had explicitly excoriated Nazi Germany. There were scenes in which a poor Jew proclaims his love for Germany, a rich Jew refuses to cheat the three comrades, and one in which the Nazis burned books (including those by Remarque). Of course, the Hays Office censored all of these scenes and made MGM remove most of the political references. The end result is a love story in which the additional pathos of a world heading back to war has been stripped away. The performances by Taylor and Sullavan are affective, and the supporting cast of Guy Kibbee, Lionel Atwill, Henry Hull, Charley Grapewin and Monty Woolley is excellent, although none of them seem particularly Teutonic. A decent love story, "Three Comrades" could have held a more prominent place in cinema history.