Arch of Triumph

The opening title card for this film reads: "Erich Maria Remarque's Arch of Triumph." Remarque's novel was first published in English in 1945. The film was the initial production of Enterprise Productions, which took over Harry Sherman's 14-acre California Studios in Hollywood and remodeled it. The New York Times called the picture an example of the "current profit-sharing trend in independent production." Arch of Triumph, Inc. was established by Enterprise directors Charles Einfeld and David L. Loew in December 1945 as a subsidiary company of Enterprise. Remarque and producer David Lewis, who purchased the story, held shares in the newly formed corporation. According to unofficial reports quoted in the New York Times article, Ingrid Bergman held the largest share in the corporation with 37 1/2 percent; Enterprise was second with 22 1/2 percent; and the remainder was split among Remarque (20 percent), David Lewis (18 percent), and director Lewis Milestone (2 percent). (According to a Los Angeles Times article, music score composer Louis Gruenberg was also given a share in the film's profits.) Remarque was reported to have received $225,000 for the rights to the story, and Bergman and Charles Boyer were each paid a salary of $175,000, as stated by an August 1946 New York Times news item.

       The New York Times article also stated that, apart from a shortage of soundstage space at California Studios, production on the film was delayed because writer Irwin Shaw quit. Shaw, who worked for five months on the scenario, disagreed with Milestone about the treatment and, in June 1946, requested that his name be taken off the picture. Hollywood Reporter adds that the disagreement revolved around Shaw's refusal to include a love story in his adaptation. Los Angeles Daily News drama editor Virginia Wright interviewed Milestone on November 19, 1946, after most of the shooting was finished, and questioned him about his decision to take an onscreen writing credit for the first time in his directing career. According to Wright, Milestone said that when he was first approached by David Lewis to direct the film and learned that Shaw had already completed the script, he declined the offer because he had "never found a completed screenplay that was satisfactory from [his] standpoint." Lewis convinced Milestone to reconsider, and he read the novel and conceptualized its development for the screen.

       When Milestone met with Shaw, however, he found that there was a great polarity between his and Shaw's screen interpretation of the novel, and again offered to drop out of the picture. Lewis and Einfeld suggested a compromise whereby Shaw would rewrite the script to Milestone's specifications; but, according to Milestone, Shaw never approached him for rewrites, so he wrote his own screenplay. Bergman and the studio preferred Milestones script to Shaw's revised version, and he was paid off. Harry Brown was then called in to write the dialogue. A few weeks later, on December 2, 1946, Wright printed a rebuttal from Shaw, which stated that Lewis not only approved of his first draft, but offered him directorship. Shaw said that he, in turn, suggested Milestone as the director. He further stated that Milestone strongarmed Lewis into accepting his script, over a version compiled from Shaw's and Milestone's drafts. In a counter-rebuttal in Daily Variety two days later, Milestone said Shaw was never offered the job of director on the film.

       According to the file on the film in the MPAA/PCA Collection at the AMPAS Library, MPAA chief Joseph I. Breen objected to the abortion scenes, which were eventually shown offscreen and depicted as "Ravic's" heroic, but futile, efforts to correct the work of "quack abortionists." Breen also objected to the notion of Ravic going unpunished for murdering "Haake" for personal revenge. PCA officials suggested making "Sybil," Haake's torture victim, "merely a symbol of Nazi victims," to eliminate personal revenge as Ravic's motive for murder. The PCA also recommended making Haake's murder self-defense, but the studio denied that request. An early version of the script included a scene in which Ravic strikes Haake three times, stuffs his body into the trunk of his automobile, strips it naked, buries it, and burns his clothes. Due to what Breen termed "excessive brutality and gruesomeness," the scenes were cut from the film. According to an article in Los Angeles Times, the killing of Haake finally was justified by the Breen office because Ravic was an Austrian killing a German on the eve of the Allies' declaration of war, which made it technically an act of war.

       Breen protested scenes showing Ravic having an illicit sexual affair with "Joan," and her becoming a "kept" mistress of "Alex," as well as a brothel scene in which Ravic examines a group of prostitutes. (The brothel scene was cut from the final film.) Breen advised the filmmakers to characterize Ravic and Joan's relationship as one of "frustrated love," devoid of sex; in the final version, their lovemaking is merely implied. Joan's general promiscuity was allowed to remain because her death at the film's close provided the necessary "compensating moral values" insisted on by the PCA. Further, the PCA objected to the suggestion of mercy killing in Ravic's final scene with Joan in which she asks him for something to numb the pain. In one version of the script, Joan says to Ravic, "You must give me something strong enough" and "It's all right for you to do it, Ravic." In the final film, it is implied that Ravic administers only a pain-killer, and that Joan is taken to the hospital, where she dies.

       A pre-production article in Hollywood Citizen-News states that actor Louis Calhern shaved off his mustache for the first time in twenty years to play the role of "Morosow," the ex-patriate Russian chasseur. The article also lists Katherine Emery in the role of the "grim nurse," but her appearance in the released film has not been confirmed. Los Angeles Examiner reported that French film director Michel Bernheim, a technical advisor on the film, was a French naval officer during the war and was taken prisoner at Cherbourg and later escaped from the Fortress of Koenigstein. He arrived in the United States in 1942 to accept a post with the Office of War Information. As reported in Hollywood Reporter, French director Georges Lampin assisted in the direction of the European sequences. George Kessel, a former Paris correspondent, was hired by Enterprise to approve the French scenes. An article in This Week on April 6, 1947 stated that second unit director Nate Watt, who filmed background scenes in Paris, had to obtain special permission to have the lights on the Arch of Triumph turned on because of a city brown-out caused by a coal shortage. Because of war damage, the crew was forced to dot a stretch of Cannes beach, full of holes and burned-out German pillboxes, with beach umbrellas to get a shot of a boat looking toward the shore.

       Hollywood Reporter news items give the following production information: Enterprise tried to borrow Robert Ryan from RKO for the role of "Ravic," but RKO reportedly made unmeetable demands for his loan-out. Before production on the film began, George Coulouris was considered for the role of "Haake." During filming in Paris, in October 1946, the French government drained the Seine River in order to remove live bombs and inspect bridge foundations, causing the European unit to improvise river backgrounds with plates and special scaffolding. As part of the recreation of an entire section of Paris in the neighborhood of Place de l'Opera, Enterprise built a set of the famous Fouquet's street cabaret at the junction of the Champs-Elysées and the Avenue Georges V. In order to shoot the small bistro and staircase sets, Enterprises chief still photographer, Scotty Welbourne, equipped a camera boom with a flexible periscopic lens. Construction of Fouquet's cabaret took approximately 16,000 man-hours and cost $65,000.

       Accurate reconstruction was made possible through stills and motion picture footage shot in Paris by the European unit and flown daily to Hollywood by special arrangement with TWA. One hundred European-made automobiles gave the appearance of traffic outside the café; a section of stage wall was removed and three banked ramps were installed to give the cars an entrance to the set and the ability to go full speed. To create a studio backdrop, photographs of the Paris skyline were enlarged to 5,600 square feet. The soundstage set also included wood-strip representations of the Arch of Triumph. In late January 1947, a cutting room fire destroyed 19,000 feet of this and another United Artists picture, The Other Love . Studio production notes state that a record 112 major sets were built for the film with a four million dollar budget.

       According to Hollywood Reporter, in mid-January 1947, process shots of the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth were taken in New York City at the ship's North River pier by a camera crew led by Watt. (The ship scenes were cut from the final print, however.) According to an April 1948 Variety news item, Einfield, one of the film's producers, added eight minutes of footage that had been cut from the film, extending the running time from 120 minutes to 128 minutes. Einfield stated that he made the additions to lighten the film and play up the romantic theme between its two stars. Production designer William Cameron Menzies was borrowed from RKO to work on the film. Prior to the film's release, Bergman recorded an album that included two songs from the film: "Prochlada," sung in Russian, and "Dicitencello Vuie," sung in Italian. Michael Chekhov was originally cast in the role of Haake, but due to illness, was replaced by Charles Laughton in mid-October 1946. As reported in Daily Variety, Haake's scenes were rewritten for Laughton and were filmed with Bergman in early November 1946 in New York City, where she was starring in the Broadway production of Maxwell Anderson's Joan of Lorraine. According to Hollywood Reporter, the film was the first motion picture transcribed to microfilm; the French Embassy asked for a print of the film-which, in microfilm, was only thirty feet long-for a dedication ceremony at which the film was to be placed in a cornerstone.

       Warrick appeared as American dilettante "Kate Haegstrom" (Ravic's former lover in the novel) in the picture, but her scenes, among others, were removed when the film's rough cut of about four hours was trimmed to a two-hour running time. In an early version of the script, Kate, who is dying of cancer, has come to Paris from Vienna to be operated on by Ravic. Near the end of the film story, after Ravic turns down her proposal of marriage, he waves to her as her ship leaves for America. No mention of the character Kate is found in the final film. Sylvia Sidney was first considered for the role of Kate. According to Louella Parson's column in the Los Angeles Examiner on October 28, 1946, Milestone planned to open a stage version of The Arch of Triumph in February 1947, before the film opened, with Warrick as Kate and Boyer as Ravic. No information on a Los Angeles stage production has been found, however. According to the film's program, the soundtrack included actual transcriptions of the speeches of French Premier Édouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declaring war on Germany on September 3, 1939; the transcriptions were secured from NBC. Studio production notes state the following: Michael Romanoff, who plays "Captain Alidze," the maitre d' of the Scheherazade café in the film, was the proprietor of Romanoff's, a famous Los Angeles restaurant in the 1940s and 1950s, and that for the scar on Ravic's face, makeup artist Gustaf Norin invented a cast in a mold that was glued to, not painted on, Boyer's face. The Variety review erroneously lists Maria Castegnaro, who worked in the studio process department, as the film's editor.

       In May 1953, a Los Angeles court denied novelist Remarque all rights to this film and the 1947 United Artists film The Other Love, which was also based on his novel. At that time, Enterprise Studios was defunct; ownership of the films, which had been foreclosed by Bank of America in 1951, was turned over to the Sunset Securities Co.