The Monuments Men

George Stout, George Clooney in The Monuments Men

James Rorimer, Matt Damon in The Monuments Men

Rose Valland, Cate Blanchett in The Monuments Men

THE MONUMENTS MEN                 C                    

USA  Germany  (118 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  George Clooney               Official site

A rousing World War II adventure drama that emulates the spirit of 1960’s movies like THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963) and THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967), though hardly living up to the action level of either one, which were fun WWII war movie that kids loved because they featured all those cool stars with plenty of personality, who personified courage and heroicism, where many didn’t survive to make it home afterwards.  Similarly, George Clooney has assembled a cast of a bunch of his friends, where this has a bit of the party feel of Soderbergh’s OCEAN’S ELEVEN (2001, 2004, 2007) series, where this group clearly has a good time together while making movies.  While the overall premise is interesting, inspired by Robert M Edsel and Bret Witter’s 2009 book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Hunt in History, which documents a small group of American and British (there were no French included) experts on art sent to the Allied front to rescue artworks stolen by the Nazi’s, while Edsel also co-produced THE RAPE OF EUROPA (2006), an important documentary work that explores the Nazi plunder of art treasures from German-occupied territories.  But there are other equally valid historical sources, such as The Monuments Men: Rescuing Art Plundered by the Nazis, an article by Ronald H. Bailey from World War Two magazine, May 2007, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, by Lynn H. Nicholas in 1995, and The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II, by Ilaria Dagnini Brey in 2010.  Hollywood, once again, embellishes the truth, as they did in the Academy Award winning Argo (2012), where the script by George Clooney and Grant Heslov takes major artistic license in its depictions of the mission, giving director George Clooney as Lieutenant George L. Stout, a World War I veteran and art conservationist at Harvard, responsibility for forming the group, passionately making his case to President Roosevelt about saving the value of artwork from Nazi looting and destruction from Allied bombing campaigns, while in reality the formation of what would become Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) was created without Stout’s input.  The idea originated in Europe where British archaeologist and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler grew concerned that remnants of ancient Roman ruins in Libya, the Leptis Magna, would be destroyed by tank warfare.  Wheeler was joined by Lieutenant Colonel John Bryan Ward-Perkins and a civil support team to reroute traffic, photograph the damage, post guards, and organize repair efforts at the site, none of which is shown in the movie. 

This action to minimize damage to ancient relics inspired a collective effort by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to inspect historical shrines and artifacts as part of the war occupation, where the first man sent in, American Captain Mason Hammond, felt the mission was “utterly foolish and a waste of time,” while Clooney and his men remain undaunted by the initial military resistance to their ideas.  Fogg Art Museum’s associate director Paul Sachs is also not depicted in the movie, though he was one of the earliest voices advocating a protection of art during wartime, initially proposing the idea of “special workmen” to implement the protection.  Sachs was appointed to the Roberts Commission, a Presidential commission designed to consolidate earlier efforts with the U.S. Army to help protect Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) in war zones, eventually taken over by the State department after the war.  It was Sachs that selected Lieutenant Stout (George Clooney as Frank Stokes, who would eventually become the curator of the Fogg Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museums in Boston), to join an elite officer corps, while also choosing James Rorimer (Matt Damon as James Granger, the eventual director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), his former professor at Harvard, who had already been drafted into the Army.  Rorimer inspected buildings in Normandy, Paris, and the surrounding countryside, eventually discovering an official Nazi looting operation of French private collections that were sent to the Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany.  While Rorimer did develop a crucial relationship with Rose Valland (Cate Blanchett as Claire Simone), an employee at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, the central transport station used by the Nazi’s, who secretly recorded the whereabouts of the artifacts stolen by the Nazi’s in France, who in real life is actually the unsung hero of this entire operation, the movie turns her into a romantic femme fatale love interest for Matt Damon, thereby diminishing her legacy, though she eventually shared her information with Rorimer, who also discovered the Heilbron salt mines which stored art from German museums, something he was able to ascertain without support from the military.  Rather than six or seven men, as depicted in the movie, the group of assigned MFAA officers originally consisted of eleven men, seven Americans and four British, but they lead a team of closer to 350 men and women, most of whom volunteered from 13 different nations, where many had expertise as museum directors, curators, art historians, artists, architects, and educators.  In the last year of the war, they tracked, located, and in the years that followed returned more than five million artistic and cultural items stolen by Hitler and the Nazi’s.  Their role in preserving cultural treasures was without precedent.

The film also distorts the historical accuracy of Hitler’s Nero Decree issued near the end of the war when most of the conquered territories had been liberated or recaptured, but was a desperate attempt to prevent Allied forces from using resources against the Reich during the war.  In the decree, Hitler ordered that “all military, transportation, communications, industrial, and food supply facilities” be destroyed, but it never explicitly included art.  In the movie, however, when Stokes reads the decree aloud, he lists “archives and art” among the things set to be destroyed.  Hitler’s will specified that his art should go to German museums, suggesting he never wanted art to be destroyed, though the Nazi’s had a way of condemning certain “degenerate” works, either Jewish or Impressionist for example, which they burned by the thousands.  The prized 12-panel Ghent Altarpiece depicted in the film, a Flemish 15th century masterpiece and one of the first major oil paintings, described as the ultimate Catholic artifact, was beloved by Hitler as an example of “Aryan genius,” while Michelangelo's white marble sculpture of the Madonna and Child on display in Bruges, created around 1504, is the only sculpture of Michelangelo's outside of Italy.  There was no mention, by the way, of the more than 50,000 artifacts stolen from The National Museum of Baghdad during the first days of the American occupation of Iraq during the 2003 invasion, containing relics of past civilizations dating back 5,000 years, and the largest collection of archeological and historical artifacts in the entire Middle East.  This little footnote in history might have brought home the notion that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, as history has shown through modern acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide that in a few short years, all physical and cultural evidence of targeted groups can be wiped away and completely destroyed, where Stokes can be heard saying “If you destroy their achievements and their history, it’s like they never existed.”  So while the intent of the movie is noble, where Hitler, in what is perceived as “the greatest theft in history,” stole more than 5 million cultural objects, what we have in this Hollywood version is filled with stereotypes and cliché’s, featuring a good old boy’s portrayal of American ingenuity and know-how, where if you believe this version, it was these seven guys that actually ended the war by discovering Germany’s hidden gold reserves, as they were tucked away in mine shafts along with all the stolen works of art.  The film also recalls John Frankenheimer’s THE TRAIN (1964), a Black and White historical thriller featuring a French resistance stationmaster (Burt Lancaster) pitted against an art-obsessed Nazi officer (Paul Scofield) trying to get a train filled with stolen art into Germany.  In contrast, this film pales by comparison, offering a meandering pace, an indifference to history, and a lack of dramatic conflict throughout, where the stellar cast barely ever engages one another, but are seen off on their own explorations, where it simply feels like an imitation of better films that were made during the 60’s.  One hopes it is not these inaccurate and streamlined Hollywood Cliff Notes version of history that people remember instead of the real individuals involved who actually made history, because as viewers we deserve better, especially from someone as intelligent and talented as this director, where it wouldn’t hurt if Hollywood historical movies “inspired by real events” actually told the truth for a change, as their value is diminished otherwise.   

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE              A 
USA  (123 mi)  1962  d:  John Ford

This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
—Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young), newspaper editor

The last great work by Ford, which interestingly looks back at characters who are themselves reflecting back upon their lives, making this something of a memory play where Ford not only examines his own role in revitalizing the American Western, using some of his own stable of familiar stars to do it, he also questions the truth about our own history, raising some interesting questions about the role of newspapers, government, literature, cinema, and other artforms, showing how truth is often buried in order to form a more perfect and idealized legend, which becomes the substitute for the truth, but instead of an examination of the misperceptions of history, much of this film unfortunately feels like a rationalization for the director’s own actions.  Certainly Ford is guilty of elevating heroes to mythical status, like the iconic stature of actor John Wayne, seen as the great American hero, the man who boldly stands above all others as an example of hard grit and that individual frontier spirit, always seen as the toughest guy and the fastest gun in the West.  But despite his penchant for so-called accuracy and historical authenticity, Ford also negatively stereotypes the West, creating racial stigmas that have lasted through generations for more than half a century, where his repeating stream of derogatory stereotypical images have contributed mightily to the racist depiction of Indians as savages in order to make way for the coming white settlers, where his own mythology has not only proven inaccurate, but helped perpetuate the myth of white superiority in a historical era of the American West when Indians were subject to attack by the U.S. Cavalry and forced to a life on isolated reservations, or total annihilation if they refused.  Surrender often led to starvation, rotten food, or worse, as so many Indians died from infection and contagious diseases. This bleak inevitability coincides with the slaughter of the plains buffalo to near extinction, all but eliminating their food source and the Indian way of life, a nomadic existence that followed the buffalo herds.  You won’t find any cultural reference to Indian genocide or extermination in a John Ford movie, with the exception of the apologetic Cheyenne Autumn (1964), which instead focuses on the legendary white heroes who settled the West. 

One of Ford’s best films, as it’s likely his most provocative and self-reflective work, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is a different kind of western, as it’s not shot in the great outdoors of the Monument Valley and doesn’t include a single Indian, instead it’s a chamber drama that moves indoors as it looks back at the first vestiges of democracy and government in action, as represented by a feisty but thoroughly domesticated James Stewart as Ransom Stoddard, a man hell-bent on bringing what he learned from East coast law school to the savage wilderness of the West, pitted against notorious gunslingers and outlaws like Lee Marvin’s deranged Liberty Valance, a sadistic killer turned monster, hired by the wealthy cattle barons to force their will upon the populace, as they believe in open range as far as the eye can see with absolutely no government intervention.  Stuck in the middle of so-called progress is John Wayne as Tom Doniphon, given the reverential treatment here, as it’s his funeral that brings an ominous tone of solemnity to the opening of the film, told nearly entirely in flashback.  Doniphon is seen as a man already forgotten, as time has passed him by, yet he’s the heart of the story, as the West would never have survived without men like him.  Ford absolutely loves paying tribute to characters like this, unsung heroes that fought the pitch battles in a lawless frontier out in the middle of nowhere to make the world better for those that followed, laying the groundwork for a progress yet to come, eventually becoming a reality through the construction of the railroad, which changed the West, as humans came in droves afterwards.  This western is not interested in the Wild West, which Ford has already shown before, where men like Doniphon and Liberty Valance prevailed, but in the taming of the West, showing the first signs of civilization, when men put down their guns and attempted to reason with one another, developing the first laws of the land, where the idea of an endless frontier instead emerges into the first arguments on statehood, becoming a highly entertaining piece of feelgood, patriotic Americana, the kind of thing you can watch on the 4th of July along with Cagney’s YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942). 

Something of an auteur project, Ford located the property, developed the script along with long-time associates Willis Goldbeck and James Warner Bellah and raised half of the money needed himself, while choosing an all-star cast, including the first time John Wayne and James Stewart worked together in a movie.  The film represents an older and wiser man in the twilight of his career looking back, having already made MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946) and THE SEARCHERS (1956), critically acclaimed works that suggest something of an alternative mythology while accentuating the struggles between the individual and society, or chaos and civilization.  The decision to shoot the film in Black and White was startling to some, as the western genre in the 60’s tended to glorify the West by emphasizing the beauty of the landscape through panoramic Cinemascope vistas, like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) or Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), but this film was shot in the murky darkness of confined spaces, creating a claustrophobic, character driven world where Stewart, for instance, spends the majority of the time wearing an apron and washing dishes with Vera Miles as Hallie and the other women in the restaurant kitchen.  It’s quite a contrast to Wayne’s swaggering outdoor independence, a man who wouldn’t be caught dead doing women’s work.  Interesting enough, both men are vying for the same woman (outside of a Mexican cantina, she is the only available woman seen in town), though their lives are on different trajectories, as Doniphon is doomed to live in a world where he cannot adapt, while Stoddard becomes one of the West’s first schoolteachers attempting to eradicate an epidemic of illiteracy.  The already outdated western hero loses his girl and fades into obscurity while the lawyer from the East, a veritable Lincoln among the ruins, marries Hallie and rises to political power, becoming a 3-time Governor before ascending to the United States Senate.  Meanwhile, in the ultimate showdown between good and evil, order and violence, or truth and legend, the awkward tenderfoot Stoddard stubbornly faces off against the gleefully overconfident Liberty Valance as the rest of the town shirks its responsibilities, hiding in the crevices and cracks in the dark, best expressed by the over-eating, freeloader sheriff Andy Devine as Marshall Link Appleyard, a man who stays alive by continually avoiding confrontation.    

One interesting aspect of the film is it never shows the audience definitively who kills Liberty Valance, though most would assuredly think it does, but it’s impossible to tell from the footage provided just who’s gun the bullet came from, nonetheless, a legend is born, as Stoddard most certainly takes all the glory and credit which stays with him throughout his lengthy career, immortalized throughout history as the two men remain inseparable.  What Ford pessimistically shows is how fate is more of an accident or even a misunderstanding, while history depends largely upon who’s telling it.  By the time this film opens, at the end of Stoddard’s illustrious career, the West has already been settled and the myth of the western hero is remembered only in storybooks and flashbacks.  Stoddard may have attempted to bring the civilized values of the East to the town of Shinbone, but he only does it through deception and violence, earning his reputation not through the law, but by killing an evil incarnate.  At a nominating convention for statehood, his name is dragged through the mud as a murderer and his reputation sullied by the flowery language of the cattle baron’s mouthpiece, none other than John Carradine as Major Cassius Starbuckle, whose own candidate is nothing more than a grotesque spectacle.  But Stoddard has his own image-maker in the form of newspaper publisher and town drunk Dutton Peabody, Edmund O’Brien, whose own overly verbose, chiché-ridden performance nearly ruins the film with such an obnoxious, self-inflated sense of ego, where at one point in a rambling drunken stupor he even resorts to quoting (incorrectly) Shakespeare’s Henry V.  Yet it’s Peabody that sings the praises of Stoddard, anointing him to his new career as a mythical western hero, a noisy, frenetically wild sequence of pure mayhem and pandemonium where Ford seems to enjoy mocking the origins of the American political process with the same cynical tone reserved for the equally empty rhetoric of today.          

What’s truly groundbreaking about this film is the way Ford reverses the wheels, turns his back on his success, and makes a film that challenges the same assertions that led to his success in the first place.  This suggests a man confident enough of his place in history that he can challenge it while he’s still alive.  The stark look of the film, taking place entirely in one’s mental recollections, makes it almost an anti-western, where Doniphon’s bold and reckless man of the West has already outlived his time.  Usually placed just after THE SEARCHERS among Ford’s greatest works, it’s an interesting critique of his own mythmaking career, one that suggests history is filled with quasi-heroes, men whose public image and persona have been beefed up to hide and obscure the far different private lives behind the image, where suppression of the truth is a natural byproduct of the mythmaking process.  In this manner, the nation’s confidence is propped up by political lies and distorted exaggerations, where one assumes this is preferable to hearing the unwholesome truth.  But it also suggests “official” explanations may be leaving out what actually happened, case in point The Tillman Story (2010) or The Invisible War (2012).  While this rather dark and sinister film is itself closer to the truth, it’s also highly entertaining and often hilarious, such as when young Ransom Stoddard shuts down the bar, by law, while voting is in progress at the territorial convention, calling it one of the “Fundamental laws of democracy, no exception,” and Dutton Peabody is repeatedly reminded by Tom Doniphon that the bar is closed, yet he keeps squirming for just a beer, as “a beer’s not drinking!”  Reminded once again that there’s no exceptions, he quivers, “Why that’s carrying democracy much too far!”  The film’s maniacal violence from the whip-wielding Liberty Valance, who has to be held back by his own men, actually anticipates even greater, exaggerated choreographed extremes from Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, and even Clint Eastwood, where ironically Liberty Valance’s two henchmen include Peckinpah’s Strother Martin and Leone’s favorite villain, Lee van Cleef.  Nowhere in the film, by the way, does Gene Pitney sing “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” though it is advertised in the film’s posters and movie trailer.  Almost overlooked in the structure of the film, due to the central tension focused between Stoddard, Doniphon, and Valance, is the film’s concern with American politics and the birth of civilization in newly formed western towns, showing democracy in action at such fundamental levels by showing the significance of the role of the press, a town meeting, a debate over statehood, and the influence of education—all indoor preoccupations. 

Something should be said about Woody Strode, Tom Doniphon’s black sidekick Pompey, who worked in five John Ford movies, from his final film going all the way back to STAGECOACH (1939).  Though Doniphon treats him like he owns him, viewed as his loyal and obedient lackey, being John Wayne’s confidante in this film also gives him a certain elevated status with the audience, as they know his loyalty is not in dispute, that he always has Tom’s back, but he’s still not allowed into the saloon in Shinbone, as the bartender won’t serve a black man.  This little bit of racial harmony among friends, but disharmony within the larger society, is interesting, as Ford is intentionally bringing attention to this racial disparity, pointing out the injustice, something he failed to notice with his own belittling portrayal of Indians.