Ingrid Bergman looks her fabled, youthful best and Charles Boyer dark and dashing as her handsome, older lover in The Arch of Triumph a forgotten minor gem of WW II movies.  Set in Paris from August of 1938 to the Nazi invasion of Poland on Sept 1, 1939, in wonderful blacks and whites, pouring rain, sodden trench coats, dripping fedoras,  with immigrants from all over Europe jamming the International Hotel, a wretched Joan Madou –Ingrid Bergman —  is rescued from disabling despair after the death of her lover by an unflappable Dr. Ravic — Charles Boyer.   Though the inevitability of their love is apparent to us, he is of a different mind.  He is illegally in Paris, fled from Austria after being tortured by the Gestapo in 1933.  His life is uncertain; he has been deported many times; Ravic is his third identity.  He deposits her in a hotel room not near his own, despite her obvious  need to be closely watched, and held.  Despite his precautions their ill-fated love affair begins, set against the secrets he can’t tell her, and her need to be secure in love.

If the approach of the war, certain to our history worn eyes, is not enough tension, Ravic’s sighting of his former torturer — Charles Laughton as Ivon Haake– in the crowds along the Champs Elysees will bring it to the twisting point.  A terrifying night ride through the Bois de Boulogne with Haake first drunk and then alert to his danger may force a few eyes closed until its over — even with the more violent scenes left on the cutting room floor as required by the 1948 Motion Picture Association production code.

Bergman is given some pretty ragged lines, and a change of character improbable enough to let us fall out of love with her, so despite the promise it doesn’t rise to the level of Casablanca, though certainly a worthy companion piece.  There is also a 1985 remake of Arch of Triumph, with Anthony Hopkins and Lesley-Anne Downey.  I haven’t seen it but Hopkins would make it a good bet.

The script is based on a novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque, known world wide for All Quiet on the Western Front.  The novel of course has more time than the film to deepen the sense of Paris in 1938-39 — as the world is falling apart.  Ravic is an expert surgeon but must operate clandestinely, as he does in the film, but on more people.  We meet his patients and feel Ravic’s humanity as he repairs a botched abortion, and amputates a leg of a young boy.  He runs a weekly health check for high-class prostitutes; we see the consequences for those to do not pass.

Remarque handles the affairs of the heart in the swirling fear of approaching war well; the approach and retreat, the hope appearing and hiding, the indecision then recognition of feelings unexpected and true.  As with the movie — a good, if not superior creation.