“Six in Paris,” “Arch of Triumph”

One of the loveliest freeform ideas to find patronage and popularity in the New Wavey...

The Arc de Triomphe holds place of pride, naturally, in Lewis Milestone’s “Arch of Triumph” (1948), an unjustly neglected romantic epic of postwar Hollywood (from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque), set in a 1939 Paris awash with refugees of the rising Nazi machine. The film glowers and broods like a noir on barbiturates — after all, the war and the Holocaust are still to come by credits’ roll. Charles Boyer is a damaged-goods doctor without papers or traceable identity trying to lay low in Paris after escaping from a concentration camp, and all is well and savvy for him in Milestone’s densely evoked refugee underworld until Boyer stumbles upon Ingrid Bergman’s lost girl, who’s wandering in the rain because she left a dead body in a hotel room somewhere and doesn’t know where to go next. They fall in doomed love, of course, but the film presses on for 133 minutes, and stretches several leagues beyond an ordinary romance, to recrimination and disenchantment and cynicism, even as the Third Reich begins its march toward Paris. Eventually, historical forces intercede, but not as you’d expect: torture, impulse killing, assassination, whoredom, much of it surprising to us but not to the characters, who turn out to be tougher and darker than we thought. What I loved as well: the movie’s high degree of political literacy, referencing the quagmire of the Spanish Civil War and the alliances of Italian fascism and France’s Third Republic as if audiences could be expected to know exactly what the characters were talking about. Perhaps they did then.

[Additional photo: "Place de l'Etoile" from "Paris vu par..." ("Six in Paris"), New Yorker Films, 1969]

“Paris vu par…” (“Six in Paris”) (New Yorker Films) and “Arch of Triumph” (Lionsgate) are now available on DVD.

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