Arc de triomphe

The film tells about Dr. Ravic(Charles Boyer),he's an exiled living in Paris before the Nazis penetrate into the city.Under false name and with no papers,aware always that the Surete(French gendarmes)could be sent away or jailed.One day he sees to Haake(Charles Laughton) a Gestapo official who tortured his anterior love and he's looking for revenge.One night in a bridge over river Sena,the refugee doctor finds to Jean Madou(Ingrid Bergman),a beauty and mysterious gal and he rescues her from a suicide attempt.The 2ªWW isn't the best environment for romanticism and a love affair but he falls is love with her.

The film is a romantic melodrama with magnificent actors.However is slow moving and little bit bored .The casting is frankly magnificent.Charles Boyer as sad refugee and gorgeous Ingrid Bergman as unfortunate damsel in disgrace are excellent.The secondary cast is awesome, impressive Charles Laughton as Nazi official, one of the his usual roles as villain and the lion's share of the acting meat deservedly goes to Louis Calhern as an exiled Russian colonel of the Czar who's a doorman in a show-coffee. Atmospheric black and white cinematography by Russell Metty who later made colorful super-productions.The film was restored with longtime but going on tedious,sluggish and dull.The motion picture is regularly directed by Lewis Milestone who directed various classic warlike movies.The flick is based on Erich Maria Remarque novel and was posteriorly rendered for TV(1985)by Waris Hussein with Anthony Hopkins and Lesley Anne Down.The picture will like to Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer enthusiastic.

Not sure about this one. There's much to like; the atmosphere, the camera work, the lighting and shadows, the closeups, the acting. But something's missing, perhaps continuity, or the impression that it all somehow fits together. Taken as a series of vignettes this film is very good. Combine the vignettes to tell a subset of the original story and it could be even better. But put it all together and it succumbs under the sheer weight of all the subplots.

And yet, despite my criticism, I am pleased to have seen it. As I said there's much to like, especially the acting. Louis Calhern is always a joy and here he lends a nuanced gravitas to his part. Charles Boyer is better than usual playing a tormented refugee torn between love and revenge. Charles Laughton is the pivot about which the story revolves and without him his one dimensional character would have been but a caricature. There's even a memorable cameo by an uncredited William Conrad. His scene is no more than a minute or so but it's not one you're likely to overlook or forget. But the best reason to watch it is of course Ingrid Bergman. Her effortless ability to switch personalities simply draws you in to her performance. Here she plays an insecure wreck, an incredibly seductive, infuriatingly deceitful and mostly terrified woman. Her character's choices are not perhaps entirely honorable but with Bergman who cares...

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.

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.

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!