1938 – Margaret Sullavan
Three Comrades
So, I’m having difficulty putting my finger on exactly why, but I found Margaret Sullavan’s performance to be good, but ultimately average in Three Comrades. On the one hand, she played a character who was in ill health most of the time, but on the other, it seemed to translate, on the screen, as a lack of energy in the performance. I don’t know if this was intentional or not. Unfortunately, I am not very familiar with Sullavan’s body of work, or I would be able to compare the performance with her other films, which were many. Then I could determine if the weakness came from a place of skill, or a lack of it. I suppose I should really think of it as a deliberate acting choice, since she was clearly revered by Hollywood for many years, and was nominated for the Best Actress award.
She played the character of Patricia Hollmann, a young German aristocrat who is now impoverished following the end of WWI. She has had health problems in the past and is now constantly in danger of slipping into terminal sickness. She meets the three German comrades, and ends up falling for the youngest of them. I originally thought the three men were Americans staying in Germany in the aftermath of the war, but no, they were all German, Sullavan being the only one of them that had anything even resembling a German accent.
I think the problem I had with Sullavan’s performance was that there didn’t seem to be any difference between Patricia when she was healthy, and Patricia when she was ill. Even when the character was feeling well, she seemed too frail. Because of this, I was able to infer that Pat would be dead by the end of the movie, and I wasn’t wrong. But again, I have to ask if this was intentional or not. But for all that, I believed her when she became bedridden. I guess I just didn’t believe her enough when she wasn’t, because it was all the same.
Still, she looked good, even beautiful. She had a waifish kind of allure that persisted, no matter what the state of the character’s health was at any given time. And story-wise, I’m not exactly sure why she committed suicide in the end, though I know that wasn’t Sullavan’s fault. She wasn’t bad, she was just drawn that way.