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threecomrades

Page history last edited by Steven A Carr 12 years, 9 months ago

FrontPage | Original Abstract

 

"Just a Sad Love Story": Three Comrades (MGM, 1938) and the 1930s Hollywood Anti-Nazi Film - Paper Accepted for the 11th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference, Lyon, France, 4-9 July 2011.


F. Scott Fitzgerald's work in Hollywood, as well as his fascination with the film industry, remain well-documented.  As Alan Margolies notes, Fitzgerald "had been interested in, maybe fascinated by, movie-making from a very early period of his life" (189).  MGM's 1938 film Three Comrades has received particular attention as Fitzgerald's only actual screen credit, despite both his literary output about Hollywood, as well as the numerous Hollywood adaptations of his work.  Critical opinions of the film vary.  Some see Fitzgerald's output during this period as evidence of his literary decline.  As Andrew Turnbull is often quoted, by the time of The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald "was a more delicate, complex transmitter than he had ever been, but the signal was growing faint" (320).  Others emphasize how revisions producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz made to Fitzgerald's script for Three Comrades point to Hollywood's incompatibility with the writer, or worse, its slaughtering of literary talent.  No doubt, the 1978 publication of Fitzgerald's screenplay for Three Comrades, along with a detailed list of changes made to it and Matthew Bruccoli's afterword, reinforced the notion that, as Jackson R. Bryer has observed, Mankiewicz "butchered Fitzgerald's script" (252).

 

Without attempting to resolve or rehash debates over whether Hollywood was a way station in a literary career already in decline, or whether the industrial mode of production was incompatible with individual literary genius, this paper explores how Fitzgerald's only on-screen credit might be useful in better understanding another nettlesome but important problem: the context of the 1930s Hollywood anti-Nazi film.  In other words, if Three Comrades points to questions regarding the importance of Fitzgerald's actual work in Hollywood, how might such questions of authorship help shed new light on both the production and reception of the Hollywood anti-Nazi film during the late 1930s?

 

Independent of such questions, the MGM film holding Fitzgerald's only screen credit itself drew divergent responses immediately upon its 1938 release, but not because of the writer's participation.  On the one hand, New York Times film critic Frank S. Nugent deemed Three Comrades "a superlatively fine picture, obviously one of 1938's best ten, and not one to be missed" (17).  At the same time, Fitzgerald's co-screenwriter E. E. Paramore argued in print that the film "emasculated and distorted" the original screenplay's anti-Nazi message, leaving only "a sad love story" (MPPDA).  Such attitudes pointed to problems of genre endemic in the Hollywood anti-Nazi film.  Indeed, perhaps no other genre besides the anti-Nazi film has become defined since its inception by what it is not, rather than what it is.  Even its chronology remains unclear.  While scholars commonly date the anti-Nazi film as beginning in 1939 with the release of Warner Bros.' Confessions of a Nazi Spy, internal industry correspondence shows that as early as 1933 industry executives were engaged in private discussions over the wisdom of making anti-Nazi films.  These debates already had begun less than a year after Germany elected the Nazis to power.  

 

To fully understand Three Comrades as an anti-Nazi film, then, means both moving away from solely focusing on authorship, as well as reconsidering what defines the Hollywood anti-Nazi film as a genre.  If Three Comrades occurred not before the birth of the Hollywood anti-Nazi film genre, but at a moment of both maturity and transition midway into the genre, then scholars today must reconsider Fitzgerald's authorship of the film's screenplay in light of how audiences of the past already were engaged in making meaning out of films like it.  How might audiences of 1938 have made sense of the film, both in terms of anti-Nazism as well as Fitzgerald's authorship?  Like questions of authorship, questions of genre remain as fraught as they are unresolved.  In addition to engaging questions of simple chronology, questions of genre also confront exactly what it was that an audience understood, whether the genre indeed has any meaningful essential characteristics, and whether the only key essential characteristic of a genre is its mutability and adaptability of its narrative and visual forms.  Indeed, shifting unanswered and unresolved questions from authorship to genre may only redistribute the same unmanageable load on to a different fulcrum.  Nonetheless, the concept of film genre offers a rationale and theoretical framework that not only encompasses questions relevant to authorship, but also situates these questions of authorship not in the abstract, but within an entire process of meaning-making operating amid an actual historical audience. 

 

The remainder of this paper thus will focus on three ways in which Three Comrades functioned within the Hollywood anti-Nazi genre.  First, before 1939 and even after, when Hollywood tried to depict the German situation in a topical way, it followed an established set of industrial practices that, more often than not, would use the "just a love story" formula in combination with other genre formulas.  Second, moving beyond seeing genre as simply a narrative formula, this paper considers authorship and print literacy as key to how the Hollywood anti-Nazi genre worked, using the cultural respectability of books, literature, and literary culture to leverage even the mildest political topicality in ways that framed audience meaning-making before that audience even entered the theatre.  Finally, as a genre film that both despecified as well as drew from the European situation at the time, Three Comrades did not need to take an overt political stance in order for 1938 audiences to think about the the film in terms of the current political situation in Germany.  Indeed, debating whether Hollywood had done an adequate job of addressing this situation became one of the key ways in which the genre could frame audience meaning outside the films themselves.  The notion that only a fraction of Fitzgerald's original screenplay had made it to the screen could only reinforce audience awareness of how the anti-Nazi genre tended to mute the politics of its literary sources.  Thus, whatever the film's failings as anti-Nazi entertainment, discussions framing the film and its failings would have engaged audiences at the time to actively think about Germany and Nazi anti-Semitism.

 

Since genre-based approaches take into account the ways in which films position audiences before those audiences enter the theater, the exhibitor preview included with the Three Comrades DVD helps illustrate each of the three ways in which MGM could streamline audience expectations for the film.  The preview masterfully integrated expectations for how the love story will work with the respectability of books and book culture.  It also completely assimilated the film's European setting, introducing just enough variation in its setting to keep audiences interested, while evoking familiar themes of class difference, postwar readjustment, and political and economic crisis.  The preview presented these themes in ways that resonated with American audiences at a time when the country was emerging from its own experiences with political upheavals following World War I, as well as the economic crisis of The Great Depression.

 

If Three Comrades relied on a well-recognized "love story" formula that was key to the Hollywood anti-Nazi genre, that reliance was anything but simple.  If nothing else, Three Comrades could easily have been "just a war buddy story" that introduced "just a love story" into the mix.  In combining and recombining these familiar formulas, the film followed established patterns of other genre films.  Based on the Erich Maria Remarque novel of the same name, the film depicted three World War I veterans attempting to readjust to postwar civilian life in Weimar Germany.  In addition to the love story, the basic "buddy" formula of three young males, with strong bonds to one another and all of whom had become deeply disillusioned by war, bore a strong resemblance to Universal's 1930 film adaptation of Remarque's earlier novel, All Quiet on the Western Front.  Indeed, Three Comrades' premise of war-weathered male camaraderie likely helped orient audiences already well-acquainted with Remarque's earlier anti-war novel.  While both the novel and the film version of All Quiet on the Western Front achieved much attention for an explicitly anti-war message, Three Comrades focused less on war itself, and more on the challenges of postwar readjustment.  Here the film departs from the classic formula of the Hollywood all-male combat film in introducing a principle female character.  Played by Margaret Sullavan, Patricia Hollman came from an aristocratic family, once wealthy but now in financial ruin as a result of Germany's economic depression.  When she meets Erich Lohkamp, played by Robert Taylor, the two fall in love and decide to get married.  Erich's comrades Otto Koster and Gottfried Lenz, played by Franchot Tone and Robert Young respectively, quickly integrate Pat within their closely knit cameraderie in spite of their class differences.  Ultimately, however, a Brownshirt murders Gottfried, and Pat reveals that she has tuberculosis and only a short time to live.

 

The apparent simplicity and familiarity of these formulas comprising the film's narrative bely a more sophisticated complexity characteristic to genres in general, and the Hollywood anti-Nazi film in particular.  As Steve Neale has persuasively articulated, and as developed in the work of Janet Staiger and Raphaëlle Moine, Hollywood genre films are anything but pure.  Rather, they amalgamate two or more genres into a new kind of hybrid (Neale 129; Staiger 61-76; Moine 155-68).  Just as Confessions of a Nazi Spy was not only a spy film but a hybrid of the anti-Nazi film and the spy film, Three Comrades was not only a love story but a hybrid love story-male war buddy cameraderie story.  In terms of Hollywood's industrial practices, such hybridization made good economic sense.  If the story of star- and class-crossed lovers appealed to a predominantly female audience, the story of male war-buddy love might be enough to get male viewers to accompany female ones to a "weepie" picture.  Additionally, such permutations belonged to a larger process of continuous generic variation.  This process allowed for new recombinations of old material, keeping relatively predictable and more recognizable formulas fresh by providing just enough variation with a German setting and suggested themes of anti-Nazism.  At the same time, Three Comrades' heterosexual and homosocial love stories kept suggested elements of the Hollywood anti-Nazi genre anchored enough so that the film would not appear completely unrecognizable, at least to some audiences who believed that film was primarily a vehicle of entertainment and not one for the personal politics of Hollywood personnel.

 

When Fitzgerald's collaborator E. E. Paramore claimed in print that Hollywood had excised the anti-Nazi content of the original screenplay, such statements further pointed to the complexity of how Three Comrades worked as a genre picture.  Unlike other genres, almost immediately, the Hollywood anti-Nazi genre emerged as much from very public awareness of what it was not, as from what it was.  In this sense, the notion of an emasculated and distorted screenplay diluting the authors' original intent to convey an anti-Nazi message only deepened the sense of the genre's failings, and thus further cemented the notion that any Hollywood anti-Nazi film would always belong to a genre doomed to failure.  The conception that failure was the genre's most enduring characteristic reached its apex with Charlie Chaplin's oft-quoted lament: "had I known of the actual horrors of the concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator" (qtd. in Robinson 485). 

 

Rather than consider Fitzgerald's participation in Three Comrades only in terms of authorship, then, a deeper examination of the Hollywood anti-Nazi film might consider both how audiences understood Fitzgerald's role as a literary author amid a project of doomed political ambitions, and how more generally literature and literary culture positioned the Hollywood anti-Nazi film as a failed genre.  Hollywood regularly drew from the higher cultural cachet of literature as a way not only to market individual titles to a reading public already conversant with the story, but also to appeal to audiences who might not have read the book on which the movie was based, but who might have a general idea of the title's popularity and story.  Furthermore, for an industry lacking First Amendment protection and one besieged by charges of immorality, cultural rapacity, and propagandizing, the cultural respectability of books could provide a public relations safe haven.

 

Because of such charges, appeals book and literary cultures became particularly important to the legitimacy of the Hollywood anti-Nazi genre, and helped justify even the most fleeting anti-Nazism at a time when even the most meager political stance in a film could become fraught with controversy.  This also meant that audiences sensed that the book could indeed do and say more than the movie.  Understanding that the Hollywood anti-Nazi film could only refer to the more overtly political sentiments of literary source materials helped reinforce the idea that this sort of film belonged to a failed genre.  If producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz only used a part of Fitzgerald's original screenplay, that only helped propel the mystique of an earlier screenplay draft that might have realized the full potential of the book's anti-Nazi sentiment.

 

Studying Fitzgerald's work on Three Comrades within the context of the film belonging to a "failed genre" can help enrich and broaden questions concerning both authorship and how an audience understood that authorship.  As a known author, Fitzgerald adapted the work of another known author, Erich Maria Remarque.  However, in keeping with the emphasis on the film's literary origins, publicity for the film emphasized only Remarque's book.  That strategy made sense, since Three Comrades already enjoyed a built-in audience literate with the basic narrative.  As noted in the exhibitor's preview for the film, the book already had appeared in serialized form in Good Housekeeping Magazine before becoming a best-seller.  In addition to asking how much Fitzgerald's authorship mattered to the film's audience, one might ask the same question of Remarque's authorship.  The appeal to literature figured centrally but not exclusively in a number of Hollywood films depicting Germany both before and after 1939. At the same time, one cannot ignore the director-star combination for Three Comrades, Frank Borzage and Margaret Sullavan respectively.  The two had previously completed an adaptation of Hans Fallada's 1932 novel Little Man, What Now for Universal in 1933.  Although more of a critique of political instability during the Weimar era than anti-fascist indictment, the film not only held topical appeal, but already enjoyed a built-in audience as a result of Fallada's novel becoming a best-seller in the U.S. and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.  Similarly, the same director-star team of Borzage and Sullavan completed MGM's 1940 The Mortal Storm.  More explicitly anti-Nazi, that film too was based on another best-seller by Phyllis Bottome.  As the exhibitor's preview for Three Comrades indicated, by 1938, Borzage's authorship figured prominently in publicity for the film, emphasizing the director's facility not with anti-Nazi pictures, but with love stories.  Books and literary culture thus did not define the genre exclusively, then, but worked in tandem with a director-star combination.  That combination, in turn, would have helped audiences recognize Three Comrades as having something to do with the depiction of contemporary Germany.

 

The third and final way in which this paper suggests broadening consideration of Fitzgerald's authorship involves examining how the failure of authorship, within a genre characterized by its failures, might have actively engaged audiences to think about Germany and Nazi anti-Semitism.  Like issues of authorship, the issues of reception raised here do not yield easy or simple explanations.  For Fitzgerald's collaborator E. E. Paramore, the failure of Three Comrades to actively engage anti-Nazism became the pretext to freely vent his personal animosity toward Hollywood Jews.  In an article for a Detroit-based literary magazine, Paramore invoked many of the unflattering depictions of Jewish movie moguls that had appeared throughout the 1930s and 40s in American popular literature.  Paramore's screed today reads like one of Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby stories, minus the sense of humor.  Comparing “the Jewish hierarchy that controls the motion picture industry” to the Rothschild banking interests and their financing of Napoleon, “another madman of the world” that was a pointed reference to Hitler, Paramore still could publicly argue in 1939 that “wealthy picture Jews” were happy not to do “anything about the Nazi and Fascist persecution of their people except contribute relief funds” while “the rest of Hollywood” stood “ready and willing to fight the racial battles of their Jewish bosses” (MPPDA).

 

In suggesting the need to broaden consideration of Three Comrades beyond solely examining Fitzgerald's authorship for the film, authorship still remains extremely relevant to the study of this film.  On the other hand, when a document shows one of Fitzgerald's collaborators griping in print that the film failed to realize the anti-Nazi stance of his and Fitzgerald's screenplay, and then used that failure as an occasion to vent sharply anti-Semitic attitudes, there are clearly questions about Three Comrades that focusing on authorship alone cannot answer.  This paper has suggested looking at the film as part of an emergent Hollywood anti-Nazi genre.  This genre-based approach not only can encompass some of the questions that have concerned Fitzgerald's authorship on the film, but can also point to new and deeper understandings regarding how audiences might have made sense of that authorship as well the film itself.  While the results of such inquiries likely will not render the Hollywood anti-Nazi film any purer or cleaner as a genre, recent scholarship on genre has suggested that genres are anything but pure and clean.  Looking at the messy and paradoxical aspects of genre holds the advantage of being able to historicize Three Comrades and Fitzgerald's only screen credit within the context of a globalized modernity, where both authorship and literacy were becoming corporate, protean, and even working at cross purposes; and where the rise of the mass mediated text destabilized any singular popular meaning for what Nazism and eventually the Holocaust might have meant to an audience, instead making possible layered and polysemic meanings and interpretations that were no less opaque for those audiences in 1938 than they are today.

 

Primary Works Cited

 

MPPDA. Press Summary for 19 Jan. 1939. ts. pt. 2, reel 22. The Will Hays Papers, Frederick MD.

 

Nugent, Frank S.  "The Screen in Review."  Review of Three Comrades (MGM, 1938).  The New York Times 3 June 1938: 17.

 

Secondary Works Cited

 

Bruccoli, Matthew.  F. Scott Fitzgerald's Screenplay for "Three Comrades" by Erich Maria Remarque.  Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois U P, 1978.

 

Bryer, Jackson R.  "Four Decades of Fitzgerald Studies: The Best and the Brightest."  Twentieth Century Literature 26.2 (1980): 247-67.

 

Margolies, Alan.  "Fitzgerald and Hollywood."  The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Ruth Prigozy, ed.  New York NY: Cambridge U P, 2002.  189-208.

 

Moine, Raphaëlle.  Film Genre.  Alistair Fox and Hilary Radner, trans.  Malden MA: Blackwell, 2008.

 

Robinson, David.  Chaplin: His Life and Art.  New York NY: McGraw-Hill, 1985.

 

Neale, Steve.  Genre and Hollywood.  New York NY: Routledge, 2000.

 

Staiger, Janet.  Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception.  New York NY: New York U P, 2000.

 

Turnbull, Andrew.  Scott Fitzgerald.  1962; New York NY: Grove P, 2001.

 

Original Abstract

 

The purpose of this paper is to explore one aspect of modernity, the possibility of polysemic meanings and interpretations in mass mediated texts, through the production and reception history of the 1938 MGM film Three Comrades.  The topic is relevant to a number of themes identified by the conference.  In addition to being the only film for which Fitzgerald received a screen credit, Three Comrades today reveals a great deal about how Europe functioned in the collective imagination of American popular culture at the time.  That Nazism is the structuring absence in this Hollywood film is as relevant to early problems of globalization in popular entertainment as it is to the "Migrations, Identities and Citizenship" initiative taking place throughout Europe, the US, and the Mediterranean.

 

Specifically, the paper considers Three Comrades as a harbinger of later problems for representing the Holocaust through mass mediated globalized entertainment.  My initial research shows divergent responses to the film.  New York Times film critic Frank S. Nugent deemed Three Comrades "a superlatively fine picture, obviously one of 1938's best ten, and not one to be missed" (3 June 1938).  At the same time, some saw the film as exemplifying how Hollywood "emasculated and distorted" anti-Nazi content in film, which in the case of Three Comrades left only "a sad love story."  Coming from screenwriter E. E. Paramore, Jr., these comments carried some weight.  Paramore had co-scripted with F. Scott Fitzgerald MGM's 1938 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel.

 

Paramore's essay is particularly interesting, since it reproduces many of the unflattering depictions of Jewish movie moguls that had appeared throughout the 1930s and 40s in American popular literature.  Comparing “the Jewish hierarchy that controls the motion picture industry” to the Rothschild banking interests and their financing of Napoleon, “another madman of the world” that was a pointed reference to Hitler, screenwriter E. E. Paramore, Jr. argued in a 1939 article that “wealthy picture Jews” were happy not to do “anything about the Nazi and Fascist persecution of their people except contribute relief funds” while “the rest of Hollywood” stood “ready and willing to fight the racial battles of their Jewish bosses” (MPPDA).

 

While a number of scholars have since offered less anti-Semitic but nonetheless similar characterizations of Jewish industry executive cowardice in confronting Nazism, this paper attempts to situate Three Comrades within both an industrial and reception context that was typical for Hollywood of the times.  Consistent with other genre films by director Frank Borzage such as Little Man, What Now? (MGM, 1934) and The Mortal Storm (MGM, 1940), Three Comrades relied heavily on a number of industrial strategies common for films depicting Europe at the time.  These included domesticating political tensions in ways that both drew from and de-specified the European situation; using literary reputation as a way to boost film's critical reputation; and drawing parallels between American and European circumstances.

 

 

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