Once again PFA is grateful to film writer Dennis Jakob, a frequent contributor to our programming - in this case for not only urging us to show Arch of Triumph, but for discovering a 35mm nitrate print which we have been able to add to the permanent collection.
“‘Arch of Triumph,' the Erich Maria Remarque book upon which the film of the same name is...based... was a story of the desperate disillusionment of not one but several battered refugees dragging out borrowed-time existences in Paris just before the recent World War. They were all of them tragic symbols - especially Ravic, the medical man - of the debris of Middle Europe's culture about to be swept away completely in the mounting wave. And the irony was that all these people should clutter sadly in the shadow of the triumphal arch.” -Bosley Crowther, New York Times.
Lewis Milestone has caught the mood of the bleak atmosphere of pre-war Paris, while concentrating on the doomed romance between Boyer, the fugitive German doctor, and Ingrid Bergman, the unemployed showgirl/courtesan. Their love affair is doomed not only because of the larger events around them, but because Boyer is bent on his own personal revenge against the Nazi official (Charles Laughton) responsible for his wife's death, and whom he has discovered strolling the boulevards of Paris. On her part, Bergman is beautiful, weak and dependent, easily slipping back into her old life. For both of them it is too late, and the film makes their doomed romance the tragic symbol of a tottering world.