Arco del triunfo

Arch of Triumph (1948)

Wow, what a difficult movie to assess, but not a difficult one to enjoy. On the one hand, it is dripping with mood and anxiety. It is about budding love and broken hearts. There is political intrigue and and incipient Nazi invasion. And it's France, Paris, center of the end of the great century of European art and culture, from the mid 1800s to the mid 1900s.

On the other hand, it seems amorphous and vague.

Director Lewis Milestone makes this 1938 Paris gloomier than Sherlock Holmes's London--the rain, the darkness, the general lack of hope is part of the great drama lurking behind every scene. Charles Boyer is the main character, a refugee of uncertain origin, and the mysterious woman with both rich and poor friends and an equally uncertain origin is played in usual melodrama by Ingrid Bergman. They have no chemistry, for sure, but that just makes their love affair mysterious as well. In fact, the whole movie is about what we don't know, and can't know by watching.

This could be frustrating for some viewers, this lack of intention, and frankly lack of clear plot. But if you can just inhabit this world, enjoying a highly polished mise-en-scene (so polished it shows its Hollywood sound stage roots, at times, though darkly, darkly), if you can just soak it up and not worry, all will be well. It's a beautiful beautiful movie on those terms, photographer Russell Meety is doing that 1940s high contrast photography to perfection. Watch how often he shoots through windows, including the great phone booth shot (repeated ten minutes later) where the accident happens in the background.

The story here is based on a 1945 novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque, and Milestone directed the legendary "All Quiet on the Western Front" two decades earlier, also based on a Remarque novel. In both cases, there is an intensity of humanity against the larger military chaos and cruelty that seems so indifferent to them. The book here was actually published in English first as "The Arch of Triumph," and was a huge bestseller before going to a German version.

I don't think it's an accident that the pre-war angst here is an echo of "Casablanca," which by now (five years later) was already legendary. Bergman, of course, is carried over (though she had just finished filming "Notorious" for Hitchcock, if you want to follow her career). And Boyer is a better version of Henried (better as an actor). For more colorful secondary characters, you'll find the incomparable Louis Calhern (with a surprisingly effective accent) and Charles Laughton (whose accent is wobbly).

This was originally a more gut wrenching four hour film, and I think it might have made more logical sense at that length, but I can see it would have been too long by far. Watch what we have and just take it in for what it is. I enjoyed it on that level very very much.

Paris, whether real or imagined, has rarely looked so spiritually and atmospherically gloomy on screen as it does in this underrated wartime romantic drama by Lewis Milestone. While the stark chiaroscuro black-and-white cinematography of the venerable Russell Metty certainly plays a hand in painting a bleak portrait of the refugee-laden French capital of the late 1930s, these conditions in the film are also derived from the fact that a good portion of it unfolds during many a rainy night. And it's under such circumstances that our protagonists—the hard-bitten, oft-deported Dr. Ravić (Charles Boyer), a victim of the Nazi regime when he was a member of the Austrian underground, and Joan Madou (Ingrid Bergman), a dispirited Italian-born cabaret singer—meet and eventually fall in love. However, this is neither the cutesy nor the heedless kind of love so often seen in lesser films. It is, rather, of the sort that takes place between two complex, multifaceted individuals who are world-weary, are aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and, most importantly in this case, know that they have little to no control over their impending future. Needless to say, both actors, who earlier worked together in George Cukor's Gaslight (1944), come through with strong, authentic performances; Bergman, especially, as her character grows the most and requires her to depict various shades. To its credit, the film's low-key, matter-of-fact approach isn't merely relegated to the love story; its political intelligence is equally sober and attentive. And the same could be said for Milestone's direction—he does not get many opportunities here to showcase his trademark camera movements. Adapted from a novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque, who also provided the source for Milestone's antiwar classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), this rich and engrossing film may have been ignored in its day but is bound to emerge triumphant sooner or later.

Lewis Milestone scored his greatest film success when he did the classic adaption of Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front in 1931. It seemed a natural for him to do an adaption of another Remarque book, Flotsam, retitled here as Arch of Triumph. I guess that United Artists didn't want the audience to think the film was about sea refuse.

Unfortunately while All Quiet on the Western Front stayed very much on its anti-war message, Milestone opted to make one of those tragic romances that Frank Borzage was more noted for. The problem of all the refugees from all the political turmoil up to THAT time collecting in places like Paris was left very much in the background.

Charles Boyer is one of those refugees, a Czech who can't go back to his own country because of Hitler's bloodless takeover. He's a doctor who's been serving in Loyalist Spain and got run out of there. With no passport, he's an illegal alien in France in 1939 and subject to deportation which he is by the way at one point in the film.

He meets Ingrid Bergman who's also a refugee of sorts from a series of bad relationships. He saves her from suicide and a relationship develops. In fact when Boyer is deported, she does what she has to do to survive.

Louis Calhern may have the best role in the film as Boyer's friend and counselor, an exiled Russian Lieutenant Colonel of the Czar's guard who is a doorman at a swank Russian café. Charles Laughton is in here to as an S.S. officer who Boyer remembers killing his old girl friend back in Spain and who he hunts without mercy. Laughton has one of the smallest roles he ever did in a film and I wish there were more of him here.

Laughton is seen briefly at the beginning doing the torture in his best Inspector Javert manner. Later on when Boyer spots him and makes his acquaintance to lure him for the kill, he's an avuncular tourist, but clearly on some kind of mission. He's good in both sides of the same character.

It's a real downer of a film, Arch of Triumph. Good thing we know how history turned out because it sure doesn't look good for the good guys when this film ends.

This could have been a much better movie. Boyer's disenchanted, vengeful refugee doctor is excellent and Bergman's Joan, unable to commit or disengage, could have been a fascinating characterisation. But while individual scenes are very fine, the film, as a whole, is oddly disconnected, suggesting ruthless cutting. The sub-plot involving Laughton's porcine Gestapo bully is perfunctory and we get far too much of Calhern's emigre. Still, the black and white photography is impressive, and I rather went for the doom and gloom!

This is certainly not Ingrid Bergman's best movie, though her performance as Joan, and Boyer's as Ravic, are terrific. But you will never see a more beautiful Ingrid than in the magnificent black and white =chiaroscuro= of Russell Metty's photography, and Ingrid is very touching as the "lost woman" hinted at but never fully realized in "Casablanca" and "Notorious." Even considering that Bergman was gorgeous on screen for almost forty years, her stunning image in this somewhat confused thriller-soap opera, is worth the price of admission; plus the dialogue is pretty good, and you get to see Charles Laughton as an evil Nazi colonel!