Arch of Triumph

It sounds good--a film based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, and directed by the same man who directed that adaptation to a Best Picture Oscar, Lewis Milestone, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, reuniting them after the successful Gaslight, and set in Paris right before the war. Arch of Triumph, though, released in 1948, is a complete misfire.

Boyer is an Austrian doctor who is living without passport in Paris, essentially a refugee (Paris was overrun by European refugees, giving the film a little contemporary resonance). He lives in a hotel with other refugees, including a former colonel in the Tsar's guard (Louis Calhern), who is his best friend. One night he happens upon a woman (Bergman) walking aimlessly in the rain. He buys her a drink, lets her stay in his room (chastely), and then learns that her lover died the night before.

He cleans things up for her (he died of natural causes, although we never find out how) and the two eventually fall in love. Boyer, after assisting a woman in an accident, is arrested and deported, but Bergman can't wait for him and ends up taking up with a playboy and moving to the Riviera. Boyer is hell-bent on getting revenge on a Gestapo officer who tortured him and killed his girlfriend, This is far more interesting than the back-and-forth romance.

Somewhere in here is a good film, but Milestone directs as if he were addled. Many things happen off-screen, including the major event of the film, which I won't discuss here. He and the script seem to want to recapture some of Casablanca's magic, but it falls flat (we even here mention of La Belle Aurore, which was of course a cafe mentioned in Casablanca). The film is far too long, badly paced, and above all, Bergman seems lost in the role. She's mostly unpleasant in the film, and Boyer tries to dump her repeatedly, and we can only agree.

What works is the relationship between Boyer and Calhern, who are a bit like Rick and Renault, (Calhern has the best line: "The world should be executed for murder") and the scene in which Boyer bumps into the Gestapo (brilliantly played, as always, by Charles Laughton) at a cafe and realizes that Laughton does not recognize him, is gripping.

But overall Arch of Triumph is a dud, and an unfortunate one.