Three Comrades (1938)

As many of you must now realise, I relieve the frustrations of much of my modern movie viewing by revisiting favourites from the far distant past -- hence my having another look at this classic MGM movie.  On many levels it is a strange film to have been made in Hollywood on the eve of World War II with its not so much anti-war message, but with its let's try to live in peace approach.  Based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, who also wrote "All Quiet on the Western Front" (the great anti-war novel from the German perspective) it features three close German friends at the close of the Great War: Robert Taylor, Robert Young and Franchot Tone -- a thoroughly representative selection of MGM leading men of the period.  They try to adjust to civilian life in a Germany of poverty and growing radicalism and are all, to some extent, in love with poor aristo Margaret Sullavan.  Encouraged by the others, despite knowing she is ill, she marries Taylor but is nearly immediately sent off to a sanitarium.  We see the comrades attempting to deal with the demands of life in a dissolute environment and, despite their noble efforts, only two of the four characters survive to the end credits.  However to see the four of them marching off into a problematic future -- two of them as transparent ghosts -- is one of the great images from '30s cinema and one that stays with the viewer forever.