During the 1960s, Remarque expanded the short story “Beyond” into a novel, which he titled Heaven Has No Favorites (1961). It described a star-crossed love story between a young sanitarium patient and a race car driver. The following year, he wrote Night in Lisbon, which centered around the theme of stateless emigrants and captured the rootlessness of many of his compatriots.
Remarque and his work remained close to the film industry during the 1960s. During his entire life he wrote, scripted, and/or acted in ten films and was nicknamed the “King of Hollywood.” In 1964, he consulted with other eyewitness experts for The Longest Day, a special effects extravaganza that won an Academy Award for Photography. The last work filmed in his lifetime was United Artists’ A Time to Love and a Time to Die, which was four years in the making. Filmed in 1968, it brought together a youthful John Gavin and Swiss starlet Lilo Pulver, plus Keenan Wynn, Don Defore, Jock Mahoney, and Remarque, who wrote part of the dialogue and played Professor Pohlmann, earning worthy reviews for his acting skills. The movie, although frequently compared to All Quiet and to Hemingway’s successful The Sun Also Rises, failed to meet critical expectations.
Few days remained for Remarque. Goddard remained at his side through rehabilitative respites from arthritis, stroke, and congestive heart failure, until his death from an aortic aneurysm in St. Agnese Hospital, Locarno, Switzerland, on September 25, 1970. She respected his wishes to be buried privately near Lake Maggiore, in the land that had become his home when Germany rejected him, and never disclosed to the public his private papers and journals.
However, two works were published posthumously and Remarque’s novels continued to be filmed or revived in various forms. In 1972, Shadows in Paradise replayed his familiar theme of postwar trauma for exiled Europeans. The following year, Leonard Nimoy and Swedish actress Bibi Andersson starred in Peter Stone’s English adaptation of The Last Station, titling it Full Circle. It riveted audiences in New York and Washington, D.C. Five years later Warner Brothers tackled Heaven Has No Favorites, renaming it Bobby Deerfield. Although directed and produced by Sydney Pollack and starring Al Pacino as the Grand Prix racer opposite Marthe Keller as his dying love interest, the film was a flawed effort.
In 1979, All Quiet was revived a third time, this time as a TV movie starring Richard Thomas as Paul, Ernest Borgnine as Kat, Ian Holm as Himmelstoss, and Patricia Neal as Paul’s mother. Filmed in Czechoslovakia, it utilized Tarrazin, a World War II concentration camp, as the barracks. The final scene depicts Bäumer as killed in action while observing a lark. Several years later, a second version of Arch of Triumph was reshot for television in France in 1985, following an abortive attempt in 1980. Unlike the original, in this version the chemistry of Anthony Hopkins and Lesley-Anne Down resulted in a more successful re-creation of Remarque’s novel.
Throughout his lifetime, Remarque revisited the themes and ideas of his earlier amazing landmark antiwar novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. In both novel and film form, his ideas continued to cause great consternation and anger to oppressive governments and kept in the public eye the tremendous sacrifice, death, horror, and destruction caused by war.
