Soldiers
returned
from the mud and blood of the battlefield will tell you, if they'll
talk about it at all, that in the anguishing hours before an assault,
a man facing the rawest of realities will modify most of his old concepts,
reconstruct his notion of vital values.
Armies in array change not only the geographer
books of men but also their doctrines of daily conduct.
War has left an indelible imprint on Charles
Boyer, the first actor to return to Hollywood from the arena where Europe's
latest tragedy is being unraveled.
Charles Boyer was in no battle. He was
forced to burrow for safety in no bombed city, nor was he a passenger
in peril on any sunken ship. And his service in uniform, as a private
in the French army, was limited to three months far from the field of
fighting.
Charles
Boyer and his wife, Pat Paterson, with his mother
just after her arrival
from France just a few weeks ago.
differences of love at the ages
of twenty and thirty,
and concludes that forty has
the best of all the chances
But
in those three months of blackouts and blockades, and in the nerve-drawn
weeks that preceded the actual outbreak of war, when Frenchmen saw all
their hopes and dreams and plans of a prosperous peace shattered by the
deepening shadow of a power-hungry Hitler, Charles Boyer, the acclaimed
actor, the elegant intellectual, the suave sophisticate, added a new measure
of mature dignity to his makeup, grasped a new meaning of the homely,
human qualities of kindness and simplicity.
Demobilized because of his age, Charles
Boyer returned from his brief tour as a supporting trouper in the democratic
company of Mars, a more mellow ....
from Hollywood magazine, August 1940