Three Comrades

Three German friends home from the First World War run a small garage together and try to stay standing in the poverty of postwar Germany. All three become attached to the same woman, Pat, and Pat has tuberculosis. The film treats love and friendship not as two separate things but as parts of the same solidarity. The ending is unusually bitter for a Hollywood picture of the period. It is adapted from Erich Maria Remarque's novel and F. Scott Fitzgerald's name is on the screenplay; this was his only screen credit, and only about a third of what he wrote reached the screen. The producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz rewrote most of the text. After consulting the censorship office, MGM removed the Nazi violence and the antisemitism of the novel, pulling the timeline back from 1928 to 1920 so the events sat before the rise of Nazism. Margaret Sullavan was nominated for an Academy Award for the part.