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Germany between wars, "fine weather for drifters." The Armistice is a beer toast while military paraphernalia burns outside, Romance (Robert Taylor) and Reason (Franchot Tone) and Idealism (Robert Young) in fraternal bond, a nation's conscience. Back home they run a small garage, into their circle wanders the aristocratic moonbeam (Margaret Sullavan) who becomes the shared Muse. "We're neither dead nor alive," she declares during one of their outings, giving husky voice to the Lost Generation's fatalism. Taylor courts the shimmering apparition, only to be struck by her fragility: Luxuriating by the beachfront on their honeymoon, she wistfully hears a cuckoo's call before collapsing from a punctured lung. Erich Maria Remarque's unstable Berlin, adapted by F. Scott Fitzgerald, revised by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, visualized by Frank Borzage. Love forever on the verge of disintegration, from the tuxedo ripping on the dance floor to the tavern-set wedding with Schubert quivering out of a hand-cranked phonograph. An accident segues into a brawl, a speech segues into a riot—Young is targeted during a political rally, Tone tracks down the rifleman past locked church doors, and suddenly it's a foretaste of Lang's Hangmen Also Die! (The final image is from Der Müde Tod.) The American view of Germany is delightfully mirrored with a German view of America, a nightclub introducing "The Tennessee Yankee Jazz Boys" in gangster fur coats and native feather bonnets. The sublime scene with Taylor throwing out his wristwatch when the ailing Sullavan becomes unsettled by its tick-tock ("Now time stands still") is undiluted Borzage, yet lyricism can only keep the darkening clouds at bay for so long. An ascending camera movement dissolves to a graveyard, the gunshots heard in the distance grow louder in The Mortal Storm. With Lionel Atwill, Guy Kibbee, Henry Hull, Charley Grapewin, and Monty Woolley. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |