Alfred Hitchcock's Writers on Suspense!

Yesterday I blogged about stars from Alfred Hitchcock's films who also appeared as performers on the radio series Suspense, which was originally supposed to be run by Hitchcock himself.

I think it's interesting to note that many authors whose stories were adapted into Hitchcock's films or who wrote screenplays for him had other stories of theirs heard on Suspense, so I've created a list for them as well; note that I'm not including Suspense episodes adapted from the same works used in Hitchcock's films (ie, the Lodger).

Raymond Chandler (screenplay for Strangers on a Train [1951]) also wrote the Suspense stories: "Pearls Are a Nuisance" (April 19, 1945) and "Pearls Are a Nuisance" (April 20, 1950).

John Michael Hayes (screenplay for Rear Window [1954], To Catch a Thief [1955], The Trouble with Harry [1955] and The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956]) also wrote (or adapted) the Suspense stories: "Lady in Distress" (May 1, 1947), "Very Much Like a Nightmare" (May 25, 1950), "True Report" (August 31, 1950), "The Wages of Sin" (October 19, 1950), "Vamp 'Til Dead" (January 11, 1951), "The Well-Dressed Corpse" (January 18, 1951), "The Windy City Six" (February 8, 1951), "The Gift of Jumbo Brannigan" (March 1, 1951), "Early to Death" (April 12, 1951), "Death on My Hands" (May 10, 1951), "Vamp 'Til Dead" (September 29, 1957) and "The Well-Dressed Corpse" (October 13, 1957). Hitchcock hired Hayes for Rear Window after hearing "Death on My Hands," which unfortunately cost Suspense one of their best writers!

Ben Hecht (screenplay for Spellbound [1945], Notorious [1946] and The Paradine Case [1947]) also wrote the Suspense stories: "The Marvelous Barastro" (April 13, 1944), "Actor's Blood" in which he also performed (August 24, 1944), "Beyond Good and Evil" (October 11, 1945) and "Crime without Passion" (May 2, 1946).

Arthur Laurents (screenplay for Rope [1948]) also wrote the Suspense story: "Heart's Desire" (March 22, 1945).

Marie Belloc Lowndes (author of The Lodger [1927]) also wrote the Suspense story: "The Story of Ivy" (June 21, 1945).

Philip MacDonald (screenplay for Rebecca [1940]) also wrote the Suspense story: "The Green and Gold String" (June 9, 1957).

Ethel Lina White (author of The Lady Vanishes [1938]) also wrote the Suspense story: "Finishing School" (December 30, 1943).

Cornell Woolrich (author of Rear Window [1954]) also wrote the Suspense stories: "Last Night" (June 15, 1943), "The White Rose Murders" (July 6, 1943), "The Singing Walls" (September 2, 1943), "The After Dinner Story" (October 26, 1943), "The Black Curtain" (December 2, 1943), "The Night Reveals" (December 9, 1943), "Dime a Dance" (January 13, 1944), "The Black Path of Fear" (August 31, 1944), "You'll Never See Me Again" (September 14, 1944), "Eve" (October 19, 1944), "The Singing Walls" (November 2, 1944), "The Black Curtain" (November 30, 1944), "Library Book" (September 20, 1945), "I Won't Take a Minute" (December 6, 1945), "The Black Path of Fear" (March 7, 1946), "Post Mortem" (April 4, 1946), "The Night Reveals" (April 18, 1946), "You'll Never See Me Again" (September 5, 1946), "They Call Me Patrice" (December 12, 1946), "You Take Ballistics" (March 13, 1947), "The Black Curtain" (January 3, 1948), "The Black Angel" (January 24, 1958), "Nightmare" (March 13, 1948), "Deadline at Dawn" (May 15, 1948), "If the Dead Could Talk" (January 20, 1949), "Three O'Clock" (March 10, 1949), "The Lie" (April 28, 1949), "The Night Reveals" (May 26, 1949), "Momentum" (October 27, 1949) and "Angel Face" (May 18, 1950). As you might imagine, Woolrich was one of Suspense producer William Spier's favourite authors!

Alfred Hitchcock's Stars on Suspense!

As you may know, director Alfred Hitchcock was originally supposed to be the guiding force behind the long-running radio series Suspense. The show first debuted on Forecast in 1940 with a truncated adaptation of "The Lodger" but when the series materialized in 1942, Hitchcock was no longer attached to the project.

Still, there are many interesting links between Hitchcock and Suspense. Much earlier I wrote a blog post about stories on Suspense that were also adapted to television on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. You can read that list here.

I think it would also be interesting to examine which actors in Hitchcok's films made appearances on Suspense. If you're a fan of Hitchcock's films and Suspense but haven't heard all of these episodes, perhaps you'll check them out? Each of these link to the Suspense Project blog!

Ethel Barrymore (starred in The Paradine Case [1947]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "To Find Help" (January 6, 1949).

Alan Baxter (starred in Saboteur [1942]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "Money Talks" (July 3, 1947).

Anne Baxter (starred in I Confess [1953]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "Always Room at the Top" (February 20, 1947), "The Thirteenth Sound" (April 26, 1951) and "The Death of Barbara Allen" (October 20, 1952).

William Bendix (starred in Lifeboat [1944]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "Pearls Are a Nuisance" (April 19, 1945), "Three Faces at Midnight" (February 27, 1947), "Break-Up" (December 30, 1948) and "The Gift of Jumbo Brannigan" (March 1, 1951).

Raymond Burr (starred in Rear Window [1954]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "Death Sentence" (November 4, 1948), "Catch Me If You Can" (February 17, 1949), "The Copper Tea Strainer" (April 21, 1949), "The Peralta Map" (March 10, 1957), "Murder on Mike" (July 28, 1957), "The Country of the Blind" (October 27, 1957), "The Treasure Chest of Don Jose" (October 12, 1958), "Out for Christmas" (December 21, 1958) and "The Pit and the Pendulum" (June 7, 1959).

MacDonald Carey (starred in Shadow of a Doubt [1943]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "The Missing Person" (May 12, 1952).

Madeleine Carroll (starred in The 39 Steps [1935]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "The Morrison Affair" (September 2, 1948).

Jack Carson (starred in Mr. and Mrs. Smith [1941]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "Easy Money" (November 7, 1946), "The One Millionth Joe" (June 22, 1950), "The Death Pitch" (March 29, 1951) and "Analytical Hour" (June 28, 1959).

Joseph Cotten (starred in Shadow of a Doubt [1943] and Under Capricorn [1949]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "Sneak Preview" (March 23, 1944), "You'll Never See Me Again" (September 14, 1944), "The Most Dangerous Game" (February 1, 1945), "The Earth Is Made of Glass" (September 27, 1945), "Beyond Good and Evil" (October 11, 1945), "The Pasteboard Box" (January 17, 1946), "Crime without Passion" (May 2, 1946), "The Thing in the Window" (December 19, 1946), "The Day I Died" (June 30, 1949), "Blood Sacrifice" (March 30, 195), "Fly by Night" (September 28, 1950), "Carnival" (January 28, 1952), "A Watery Grave" (March 10, 1952), "Arctic Rescue" (December 22, 1952), "Tom Dooley" (March 30, 1953), "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (December 15, 1957) and "Red Cloud Mesa" (August 2, 1959).

Hume Cronyn (starred in Shadow of a Doubt [1943] and Lifeboat [1944]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "Double Entry" (December 20, 1945), "Too Many Smiths" (June 13, 1946), "Blue Eyes" (August 29, 1946), "The One Who Got Away" (November 14, 1946) and "Make Mad the Guilty" (June 5, 1947).

Robert Cummings (starred in Saboteur [1942] and Dial M for Murder [1954]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "The Dead of the Night" (November 16, 1944) and "Want Ad" (January 25, 1954).

Marlene Dietrich (starred in Stage Fright [1950]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "Murder Strikes Three Times" (February 16, 1950).

Henry Fonda (starred in The Wrong Man [1956]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "Summer Storm" (October 18, 1945).

Joan Fontaine (starred in Rebecca [1940] and Suspicion [1941]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "The Love Birds" (March 3, 1949).

Martin Gabel (starred in Marnie [1964]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "The Devil in the Summer House" (November 3, 1942)

Cary Grant (starred in Suspicion [1941], Notorious [1946], To Catch a Thief [1955] and North by Northwest [1959]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "The Black Curtain" (December 2, 1943), "The Black Curtain" (November 30, 1944), "The Black Path of Fear" (March 7, 1946) and "On a Country Road" (November 16, 1950).

Edmund Gwenn (starred in the Skin Game [1931], Foreign Correspondent [1940] and The Trouble with Harry [1955]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "the Fountain Plays" (August 10, 1943) and "Murder in Black and White" (April 14, 1949).

Sir Cedric Hardwicke (starred in Suspicion [1941] and Rope [1948]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "The Diary of Dr. Pritchard" (October 6, 1952).

John Hodiak (starred in Lifeboat [1944]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "Dateline: Lisbon" (October 5, 1944), "The Case History of a Gambler" (December 17, 1951), "The Big Heist" (December 1, 1952), "The Gold of the Adomar" (January 19, 1953), "The Mountain" (March 16, 1953) and "Hellfire" (September 28, 1953).

Henry Hull (starred in Lifeboat [1944]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "The Pit and the Pendulum" (January 12, 1943).

Otto Kruger (starred in Saboteur [1942]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "The After Dinner Story" (October 26, 1943).

Charles Laughton (starred in Jamaica Inn [1939] and The Paradine Case [1947]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "The ABC Murders" (May 18, 1943), "Wet Saturday" (December 16, 1943), "The Man Who Knew How" (August 10, 1944), "The Fountain Plays" (November 23, 1944), "An Honest Man" (August 5, 1948), "De Mortuis" (February 10, 1949), "Blind Date" (September 29, 1949), "Neill Cream, Doctor of Poison" (September 17, 1951), "Jack Ketch" (September 22, 1952) and "The Revenge of Captain Bligh" (May 17, 1954).

Norman Lloyd (starred in Saboteur [1942] and Spellbound [1945]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "My Own Murderer" (May 24, 1945) and "Fury and Sound" (July 26, 1945).

John Loder (starred in Sabotage [1936]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "Banquo's Chair" (June 1, 1943), "The Cross-Eyed Bear" (September 16, 1943), "Banquo's Chair" (August 3, 1944) and "The Brighton Strangler" (December 21, 1944).

Peter Lorre (starred in the Man Who Knew Too Much [1934] and Secret Agent [1936]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "'Til Death Do Us Part" (December 15, 1942), "The Devil's Saint" (January 19, 1943), "The Moment of Darkness" (April 20, 1943), "Back for Christmas" (December 23, 1943), "Of Maestro and Man" (July 20, 1944) and "Nobody Loves Me" (August 30, 1945).

Herbert Marshall (starred in Murder! [1930] and Foreign Correspondent [1940]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "The Lodger" (on Forecast, July 22, 1940), "The Beast Must Die" (July 13, 1944), "My Own Murderer" (May 24, 1945), "Holiday Story" (December 23, 1948), "The Victoria Cross" (November 2, 1950), "Betrayal in Vienna" (October 8, 1951), "Rogue Male" (December 31, 1951), "The Thirty-Nine Steps" (March 3, 1952), "The Diary of Captain Scott" (April 21, 1952), "Frankenstein" (November 3, 1952), The Mystery of Edwin Drood Part One and Part Two (January 5 and 12, 1953), "The Dead Alive" (March 9, 1953), "The Man Within" (April 27, 1953), "Action" (October 5, 1953), "Murder by Jury" (February 22, 1954), "Back for Christmas" (December 23, 1956), "Flood on the Goodwins" (July 14, 1957), "The Long Shot" (February 9, 1958), "The Man Who Won the War" (October 5, 1958) and "The Waxwork" (March 1, 1959). Marshall had more leading roles on Suspense than any other actor!

James Mason (starred in North by Northwest [1959]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "Where There's a Will" (February 24, 1949), "Banquo's Chair" (March 9, 1950), "The Greatest Thief in the World" (June 21, 1951), "Odd Man Out" (February 11, 1952), "The Queen's Ring" (December 28, 1953) and "The Dealings of Mr. Markham" (November 2, 1958).

Ray Milland (starred in Dial M for Murder [1954]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "Night Cry" (October 7, 1948), "Chicken Feed" (September 8, 1949), "Pearls Are a Nuisance" (April 20, 1950), "After the Movies" (December 7, 1950) and "The Log of the Marne" (October 22, 1951).

Robert Montgomery (starred in Mr. and Mrs. Smith [1941]) also served as the host and producer of Suspense in 1948 when it became a one-hour program; he also starred in the Suspense episodes: "The Lodger" (December 14, 1944), "The Black Curtain" (January 3, 1948), "The Lodger" (February 14, 1948), "In a Lonely Place" (March 6, 1948), "Night Must Fall" (March 27, 1948) and "The Thing in the Window" (January 27, 1949).

Mildred Natwick (starred in The Trouble with Harry [1955]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "The Furnished Floor" (September 13, 1945).

Maureen O'Hara (starred in Jamaica Inn [1939]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "The White Rose Murders" (July 6, 1943).

Gregory Peck (starred in Spellbound [1945] and The Paradine Case [1947]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "The Lonely Road" (March 21, 1946), "Hitch-Hike Poker" (September 16, 1948), "Murder Through the Looking Glass" (March 17, 1949), "Nightmare" (September 1, 1949) and "The Truth About Jerry Baxter" (June 14, 1951).

Claude Rains (starred in Notorious [1946]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "The Hands of Mr. Ottermole" (December 2, 1948).

James Stewart (starred in Rope [1948], Rear Window [1954] and Vertigo [1958]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "Consequence" (May 19, 1949), "Mission Completed" (December 1, 1949) and "The Rescue" (April 19, 1951).

Dame May Whitty (starred in Suspicion [1941]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "The Black Shawl" (July 27, 1944), "Cricket" (March 15, 1945), "My Dear Niece" (January 24, 1946) and "Night Must Fall" (March 27, 1948).

Jane Wyman (starred in Stage Fright [1950]) also starred in the Suspense episode: "Catch Me If You Can" (February 17, 1949).

Robert Young (starred in Secret Agent [1936]) also starred in the Suspense episodes: "A Friend to Alexander" (August 3, 1943), "The Night Reveals" (December 9, 1943), "The High Wall" (June 6, 1946), "You'll Never See Me Again" (September 5, 1946), "Crossfire" (April 10, 1948), "Celebration" (September 23, 1948) and "A Murder of Necessity" (March 24, 1952).

More connections between Hitchcock and Suspense tomorrow!

Radio Recap: Danger, Dr. Danfield

"Dr. Danfield, student of crime psychology, has many times provided the police with the solution to a baffling crime. There's an interesting case ahead for the doctor today..."

Danger, Dr. Danfield! was an ABC detective program that ran from August 18, 1946 'til April 13, 1947. It starred Steve Dunne (the other Sam Spade on the Adventures of Sam Spadeunder the alias "Michael Dunne" for some reason) as the titular Dr. Danfield and Joanne Johnson as Rusty Fairfax, his smitten secretary. The show was written by Ralph Wilkinson and produced by Wally Ramsey. A few familiar voices can be heard, particularly Howard McNear, who's in at least three episodes.

The conceit of the series was that Dr. Danfield was a crime-solving psychologist (like Flamond of the Crime Files of Flamond). Sometimes he'd be invited by the police to investigate a case but for the most part, he was like most amateur detectives - a busybody who seemed to find crimes everywhere he went. Although he claimed to be a psychologist his solutions were, if I'm being generous, armchair psychology; really though, they're just educated guesswork, no different than most radio detectives. Secretary Rusty Fairfax would spend each drama swooning over her boss while being perpetually rebuffed by him.

The Old Time Radio Researchers' summary of this series has the harshest criticism I've ever encountered in their listings, writing: "This series consistently featured some of the worst acting and writing of any detective show to reach the airwaves." I won't co-sign that, but I do admit this is not a great detective show. A lot of that falls on Danfield, who is simply far too smarmy to be an acceptable protagonist. He's as puffed-up as Ellery Queen and as conceited as I Deal in Crime's Chuck Morgan.

The Old Time Radio Researchers have a YouTube playlist of 26 episodes of Danger, Dr. Danfield:

Backsliding

I've recently been looking back on the television series Sliders and, man... that show wasn't very good, was it?

Sliders was a science fiction show created by Tracy Torme. It starred Jerry O'Connell as Quinn Mallory, an inventor who built a device that enabled him to travel into parallel worlds. Unfortunately, the device lost the coordinates to his original reality and so he and his comrades (originally including Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks and John Rhys-Davies) are perpetually 'sliding' from one reality to another, hoping each time they might find the way back home.

The series aired on Fox for 3 years (1995-1997), took a year off, then returned on the Sci-Fi Channel for 2 more years (1998-2000). When the series was first announced I was interested in it but I had no idea exactly when the show started airing or what time it was on in my area. I think it was originally on Fridays; whenever it was, I wasn't usually around when it aired. The first time I caught an episode on its original airdate was when I saw the season finale; I had no idea if the show would be back for a 2nd season but I wanted to see it. I was surprised to learn in retrospect that the 1st season had only 10 episodes. What a brief window!

Season 2 is where I really started watching the show and there's a lot of fun ideas in that season. The show didn't take itself too seriously with wacky concepts like a world where people believe in witchcraft, or where California was part of Texas. Easily the episode I most enjoyed at the time was "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome," where the cast encountered an alternate version of Rhys-Davies' character and weren't certain which version slid with them at the episode's end. In retrospect, this 13-episode season was the highlight of the series.

I saw almost every episode of the 3rd season when they first aired. At the time, I noticed there were a lot of episodes that seemed like rip-offs of popular films. To this day I've never seen the movie Species but I assumed the episode "the Breeder" was a Species rip-off. Apparently, that was deliberate as Tracy Torme got booted off his own show this season. The showrunners also drove off Rhys-Davies and replaced him with Kari Wuhrer. In what became a tradition for the show, whenever a cast member quit Sliders the writers gave their character a humiliating, definitive, cruel death scene. This wound up being Sabrina Lloyd's last season too. Lloyd went on to better things with Sports Night while Rhys-Davies went on to, um, You Wish, but more importantly had no other commitments when Lord of the Rings started filming.

It was watching this season again that really cemeted for me how little the creators cared for their own program. Take the episode "Paradise Lost," where they slide into a small town (rather than either of their usual haunts, the cities of San Francisco or Los Angeles) where the citizens feed people to a Tremors-style monster to prolong their lives. When your show's high concept is that you can send your characters into a parallel world, how do you end up with an episode like this? There's nothing about the script that suggests Sliders; if you told me it was taken from the X-Files or Outer Limits' slush pile, I'd believe you.

The Sci-Fi Channel years saw the show become kind of a vanity project for Jerry O'Connell as he brought in his brother Charlie pretty much just because he had the clout to make them hire his brother. When the O'Connells both quit the show, the series attempted carry on without them, but kept the character of Mallory by casting a new actor (Robert Floyd) as Mallory's alternate self.

Watching that final season of Sliders, it's especially grim to see how far the budget must have fallen. Instead of filming on the Universal backlot, they were shooting on low-budget sets that looked to be made of cardboard and about 5' square. It's amazing that the show carried on so far, but I guess circa 2000 there was a lot of science fiction on cable networks and in syndication (Stargate: SG1, Andromeda, Earth: Final Conflict, First Wave) and I guess every studio and network wanted skin in the game.

I think there are some fun gems in the first 2 seasons of Sliders but boy, overall this show does not hold up.

The Hypocrisy

In the past few months an increasingly large amount of dirt has been revealed about the sexual assaults committed by singer Michael Taitt over the course of 20 years or more, particularly when he was the lead singer of the Newsboys (which he stepped down from just as the allegations started appearing). The most full accounts of these incidents have been reported at the Roys Report. From the way in which the people who were his victims or those who held the victims' confidence, it sounds like this was an "open secret" that many people near Taitt knew about, but it was kept from the public.

And that's... depressingly familiar. So often when a Christian leader of any type (singer, pastor, etc.) has their scandals made public, we find out there was some kind of cover-up going on. Sometimes the victims themselves don't want the incidents to be made public or the leader's entourage/ministry board work hard to keep the allegations from coming to light for fear of what it would do to the leader's ministry; despite the obvious hypocrisy at play, it's seen as better to accept and conceal the leader's sins rather than confess their sins and repent.

It reminded me of Michael English. Back when I was obsessed with Christian music, watching Christian music videos nearly all day long (back when there was the 24-hour Christian 'Z' music channel) and reading every magazine with at the very least a column on the subject, I absorbed a lot in those pre-internet days. Yet I didn't know what went on to Michael English; for a while, he was a really big rising name in Christian music, his video played all the time, he won four Dove Awards, then he disappeared in 1994.

I didn't find out what had happened to him until he popped up on an episode of Entertainment Tonight in 1996; while promoting his new career as a "secular" music artist, ET went over his past and I learned for the first time that in 1994 - just a week after he won all those Dove Awards - he returned the awards and revealed he'd been having an extra-marital affair.

What amazed me was that it was like a different kind of cover-up took effect; he was basically erased from Christian music. I didn't read so much as an angry editorial denouncing him (though I'm certain many must have been written at the time). Instead, his music and videos were taken out of circulation and no one talked about him.

All of which makes me think, we Christians are the worst at talking about sin. We might be willing to concede that, "oh, yeah, we're all sinners." But if you're a sinner - and a very public figure in the church - then your choice seems to either take the English path-- be "ghosted" by your fellow Christians -- or take the Taitt path-- widen the circle of sinners by enlisting conspirators to cover-up for you until it's inevitably made public.

Maybe if we didn't "ghost" people who own up publicly about their sins, we wouldn't think it necessary to form vast conspiracies to "protect" the public from learning about popular people's frailties. But as it is, these cover-ups do real harm to the mission of the church by taking one man's sin and expanding it to corporate size. To an outsider, it must seem that we're all hypocrites who claim to be sinless, yet full of leaders who are constantly being exposed as having committed acts that anyone else would be prosecuted for.

Sacrificial Love

Recently my pastor David delivered a sermon where he reflected on what makes romance stories popular. One of the conclusions he drew was:

They're wonderful stories because they tell us something of the truth of love. Somebody is coming to help you; somebody is coming to hold you and to rescue you. Regardless of your past, they will love you. And that is a beautiful thing about these stories. But the problem of the modern romantic comedy is that something else seeps into it. And that's that the story of romance is that you are good and valuable as you are now. You are loved. And this is the depth and the breadth of which I'm willing to go to declare that to you, to state your value to you. But the modern romantic comedy sometimes has this message steep in that although you are good enough now, you never have to change. You're perfect as you are. But the true gospel message, Jesus looks at you and says, "You are great and you are wonderful and you are worth it in this moment. You are valuable and I'm willing to go to these depths and lengths for you as you are now." But the love story of Christ continues on because he says, "I will continue to redeem you. I will continue to save you from the mess and the mire and the muck that you're in. And I will take you to that place where you will shine.

Thinking about this, I'm interested in analyzing a particular type of romantic narrative. Frequently in romantic fiction, there's a high value placed on sacrifice. Often there's some sort of barrier between two lovers - perhaps their physical location, their careers - and one must sacrifice from that part of their lives (relocate to where their lover resides, quit their job) in order for them to be together.

I can think of a few love stories that concern sacrifice; sometimes it's a very tragic sacrifice, as in the fiction of Erich Maria Remarque; his novel Three Comrades (1936) was mostly concerned with two young lovers (Robert and Patricia) against the backdrop of a changing Germany as the Nazis rose to power. The rise of fascism is definitely not an encouraging backdrop for a romance and, indeed, Three Comrades ends tragically as Patricia dies just as the Nazis are coming into power. But it's the way Patricia dies that's so striking: suffering from a lung hemorrhage, she sees Robert depleting all of his meager funds to help prolong her life. Seeing her precarious health as a burden upon Robert and doubting that she has much hope of recovery, she hastens her demise for Robert's sake.

You can debate whether her sacrifice was the best course of action, but it is absolutely a depiction of sacrificial love, definitely on the most extreme end of that scale compared to lovers who sacrifice a job or an existing relationship.

I think I respond strongly to Three Comrades because - like my pastor - I see something in romantic fiction that points to Jesus and his love. And by "romantic," I think I can expand that to the classical definition of romance (as a Portuguese speaker, I'm amused that the Portuguese still use the traditional 'romance' when referring to fictions of all types). When a character in a war story gives up his life to save one of his buddies, what can that be but sacrificial love?

"Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." (John 15:13) I do believe that and I'm certain the reason a story like Three Comrades - or other fiction by Remarque such as the Spark of Life (1952) - elicit such a strong emotional reaction from me because they're about people sacrificing their lives for the sake of others (in the case of the Spark of Life, it's a concentration camp prisoner who gives his life for his fellow prisoners).

As a Christian, I don't have to look too hard to find my beliefs this reflected in art, but I think it's worthwhile to draw attention to it. I'd like to think this might be true for much of what we like in fiction-- we like them because they assure us about things we believe to be true.