Charles Boyer & Ingrid Bergman reunite (after their successful pairing in Gaslight) for this 1948 romantic drama. It's the eve of WWII & Boyer, a refugee in Paris, uses an assumed name to ply his medical wiles on other refugees while he searches for a Nazi, played fleetingly by Charles Laughton (a waste here frankly!) who tortured him & killed his lover. One night he comes upon Bergman in the throes of a suicide attempt, saves & brings her back home, nursing her back to physical & mental health culminating in her falling in love w/him. As the union becomes a tumultuous one (he leaves for stretches at a time to ply his trade & continue his search for the errant Laughton), she ends up romancing another while singing at a nightclub which also ends up being a raging sea like her other loves w/her being shot & paralyzed. You would think the pairing in itself is enough for admission but here this overlong romance soon grates & confounds making the viewer think they were better off never meeting in the first place but when it's working, it does, until it doesn't. There was a remake in 1984 w/Anthony Hopkins & Lesley-Anne Down which from what I've read never corrected the original's errors. Also starring Louis Calhern as a long time friend of Boyer's.
Review of Arch of Triumph
