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.   

Force of Evil

FORCE OF EVIL        A             

USA  (78 mi)  1948  d:  Abraham Polonsky

Whatever he tries to do is wrong. Because it has to be wrong. Because the situation is such that whatever you do is wrong. All films about crime are about capitalism, because capitalism is about crime. I mean, quote-unquote, morally speaking. At least that's what I used to think. Now I'm convinced.  

—Abraham Polonsky, from Red Hollywood (1996)

One of the neglected gems of the 1940’s, a unique experience in American film history, described as “one of the fiercest dissections of laissez faire capitalism ever to come out of Hollywood” by Nicholas Christopher in his book Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, this is a brilliant Black and White film noir with John Garfield at his best as an attorney who works for a mobster and finds himself, and his brother (Thomas Gomez), caught in a numbers racket scheme.  When one points to cynicism, this may be what they had in mind, as this film is all about attitude, trying to get over in a foolproof way of beating the system.  Screw the other guy, as in the Wall Street jungle, it’s all about self preservation.  Very few films compare to Bogart and Bacall, with Out of the Past (1947) being one of them, and this is another.  Particularly notable for its unusual, highly stylized and poetic dialogue, where one can almost hear the voice of Bogie reading them, with a standout voiceover that compares with the best, becoming one of the more radical inventions of 1940’s cinema.  Having written the intense screenplay for Garfield in Body and Soul (1947), a boxer who defies the mob and refuses to throw a fight, seen as a victim of a ruthless capitalistic system where the fix is in, the film is as much Polonsky’s as director Robert Rossen’s, where Polonsky allegedly prevented the director from altering the finale.  FORCE OF EVIL is Polonsky’s sole example of his directing brilliance before he was blacklisted and could only work as an uncredited screenwriter for both films and television over the next twenty years.  Garfield suffered a worse fate, having grown up in poverty in the streets of New York during the Depression, where he became associated with gritty, hard-nosed, and working-class characters, and while his wife was a communist, there’s no indication Garfield was ever a member, nonetheless the House Un-American Activities Committee hounded Garfield to his death, as after his original testimony, he learned they were reviewing his testimony for possible perjury charges, where he died at the age of 39 of a heart attack, allegedly aggravated by the stress of the blacklisting.  Both Polonsky and Garfield were blacklisted as much for the tone of their films as their politics, where Polonsky’s heroes are cocky, self-assured loners who are outside the mainstream of society, the kind of guys that break the rules in order to get ahead, often disregarding the interests of others.  These were not the cardboard cut out caricatures of morally righteous men that dominated Hollywood cinema.  Polonsky also wrote a part for a washed-up boxer (Canada Lee, who also died shortly after being blacklisted) in Body and Soul (1947), one of the earlier examples of a black character portrayed with such humanity, a man exploited whose feelings and emotions mattered, exactly the kind of challenging work that was viewed as critical of America and raised the suspicions of the HUAC Committee.

Released as a B-movie, adapted from Ira Wolfert’s 1943 novel Tucker’s People, this is an underworld thriller completely ignored in its time, while it’s now seen as a cult classic, where The Hollywood Reporter complained that the direction was “more concerned with plugging the verbose dialogue than in achieving action and dramatic values,” while modern critics now praise the film for exactly those same qualities.  An outgrowth of the Group Theatre collective of the 1930’s where its New York City members agonized over whether film work in Hollywood was tantamount to selling out, the work was a major influence on director Martin Scorsese who called the film a seminal influence on his own gangster dramas Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990), claiming nobody played guilt better than Garfield, where Garfield’s conflicted anti-hero brought a cynical edge to the picture.  Something of a morality play, Garfield plays Joe Morse, a selfish, Wall Street lawyer who grew up on the streets of New York and whose sole client is mobster Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts) who controls the numbers racket, a man with an office so high that it’s practically “in the clouds” overlooking Wall Street, while his brother Leo (Gomez) is a small-time numbers operator.  Both become casualties of their ultimate desire for success, where organized crime becomes the family business, corrupted by the process while seeking the American dream.  Looking behind the veneer of fair play, these men align themselves with outlaws and criminals, trying to catch a break by cheating and fixing the books, which is seen as the real American way in a cutthroat capitalistic system. Polonsky was the son of a Jewish pharmacist growing up in New York, graduating from City College and Columbia Law School while developing a strong political conscience early in life when nothing had a greater social impact than the Great Depression, “I came of age in a country that had come to a standstill, with fifty million unemployed and the banks closed.”  Polonsky landed a career writing for radio in the late 1930’s, including Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre of the Air, before deciding to work as the educational director and newspaper editor of a regional CIO union north of New York City.  Even after being hired as a screenwriter by Paramount in 1945, Polonsky remained an unapologetic Marxist with a commitment to leftist values that never wavered, where he continued as an educator throughout his life.  A quarter of a century before THE GODFATHER (1972), Polonsky’s ultimate masterpiece exposes the striking similarities between American business and organized crime, where Scorsese notes, “It’s not just the individual who’s corrupted, but the entire system.”  Polonsky crafts a film that describes the greed at the heart of American capitalism, where in his view, while wealth and power comprise success in America, they also contribute to spiritual and physical ruination.

The film opens with the matter-of-fact offscreen voice of Joe Morse speaking over an overhead shot of Wall Street where cars and pedestrians are seen like ants scurrying below, “Tomorrow, July 4th, I intended to make my first million dollars...temporarily, the enterprise was slighty illegal, you see I was the lawyer for the numbers racket...The suckers bet on any combination of three numbers.  Twenty million bettors a day in the United States, an annual income of over $100,000,000...it seemed a shame so much good money to go to waste in other people's pockets...”  The mob controls the gambling racket, and the fix is in for popular number “776” to come up a winner on the 4th of July, a scheme that will force the small time operators to go out of business when they’re unable to make all the winning payouts, allowing Tucker to swoop in and gain a controlling monopoly.   Morse has developed his own philosophy where he believes the only “natural” human reaction is greed, not guilt, calling anyone not included in their scam “suckers,” where he’s completely dismissive of ordinary people.  Morse’s conflict, however, is he wants to save his brother Leo from going under, like the other small-time operators expected to go belly up, so without revealing the actual details of the scam, he tries to get him in on the swindle, but has little luck convincing him, as Leo is a proud and seemingly morally upright business operator who has to be reminded by Joe that he’s actually working for a criminal enterprise, where characters keep forgetting that they’re not actually honest men, that they're crooks.  The duality of their relationship is built into the script, one feeling forced into evil and the other talking himself into believing he’s a good man even though both are complicit in the same corrupt system, where one wants millions while the other is content to settle for thousands, making the point that racketeering is not so different from other businesses in a capitalist society, except it’s theft on a grander scale, exactly like The Emperor Jones (1933), where a moral distinction is made between the nickel and dime small-time theft and the real thieves that steal millions, major players who always seem to come out on top smelling like roses.  Drawn into the conflict is Leo’s secretary Doris (Beatrice Pearson in her film debut, before eventually returning back to a life on the stage), who overhears the brother’s argument in Leo’s office, whose naïve innocence attracts Joe, who is otherwise having a sordid affair with Tucker’s scene stealing femme fatale wife, Edna (Marie Windsor), where there’s an interesting parallel between the women and the good/bad dichotomy of the brothers.  The role of Doris plays into the complexity of the movie’s themes, as she projects a clean, all American girl image, yet she’s been a secretary for a criminal operation for several years.  After she gets arrested, when Leo’s operation is busted by the cops from an internal tip, this moral stain plays prominently in her decisions, as only afterwards does she allow herself to be drawn into Joe’s more contemptible world, as if it’s a way of expressing how much she loathes herself for getting caught up in these murky waters.  Their sexual tension, however, is expressed nearly entirely through the crackle of their seductive dialogue, where she’s undeniably drawn to Joe’s naked self-interest and nefarious lifestyle.  After awhile, the tone of her initial innocence seems as world weary as Garfield’s pessimistic voiceover, both conveying the mood of classic film noir, where emotions get swept under a tidal wave of criminal deceit.       

The driving force behind the film is Garfield, perhaps best known for his sizzling performance with Lana Turner in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946), which shocked the nation when Garfield was seen onscreen using his tongue when kissing Turner, but also established Garfield as a matinee idol with raw sex appeal.  More rough-edged than most leading men, he is rugged, broad-shouldered, displaying a certain sexual swagger as he attempts to charm his way out of trouble, smooth under pressure, even when on the wrong side of the law, but also strong-willed and verbally combative, known for taking things personally, usually ending up fighting through the ethical morass to set things straight, where he never gives anything less than a compelling performance.  Standing up to Joe in this film is his brother Leo, an honorable man who cares about the people that work for him, always looking ruffled and disheveled with sweat pouring off his brow, a more neurotic everyman who is disgusted by the mob and the way they threaten and intimidate, wanting out of the business altogether when they take over, but the more he wants out, the more Joe reels him back in, trying to protect him by forcing him to accept conditions that he stopped questioning long ago.  The film has very modern implications, even when written more than half a century ago, as our current time is fraught with the same implications of the predatory practices of capitalism, with rampant capitalistic mergers and acquisitions, often under shady circumstances, where larger corporations are continually swallowing up smaller companies in order to monopolize the competition, all in the name of interglobal free markets.  Today Wall Street institutions can be blamed for insatiable greed and opportunism, but also for destroying the lives of so many ordinary people.  The film’s title was never more apt, as every character is touched and tainted by the same allure, even against their will, as they simply can’t stop themselves.  Relentlessly grim, the film is enhanced by the bold visual stylization from cinematographer George Barnes, using abstract compositions, alternating between high and low angles, conveying a claustrophobic world of difficult choices, where he creates a strangely unpopulated city that emphasizes the bold architectural grandiosity of the buildings and facades, while the streets remain virtually empty, where many images are meant to resemble Edward Hopper paintings.  Especially impressive is the final sequence, a climactic descent winding their way down a stone stairway to the rocks below under the George Washington Bridge along the Hudson River, “I just kept going down and down there.  It was like going down to the bottom of the world,” a wrenching journey into the criminal underworld, complete with perilous consequences, which is such a stunner that it was likely in Hitchcock’s mind when shooting Vertigo (1958) under the Golden Gate Bridge.  The film tanked at its unfathomable 1948 Christmas holiday release (who in Hollywood thought this was a Christmas movie?), where the assistant director, by the way, was Robert Aldrich, who would go on to direct the apocalyptic film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly (1955), no slouch himself, often thought of as the film that spelled the end of the film noir era, while this film was selected to the National Film Registry in 1994.

Kiss Me Deadly

KISS ME DEADLY                A-                   

USA  (104 mi)  1955  d:  Robert Aldrich

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

—Remember, by Christina Rossetti, 1862

A low down and dirty apocalyptic film noir, filmed during the end of the noir era, set in the atomic age of the 50’s, where screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides, whose novel Long Haul was used for Raoul Walsh’s THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT (1940), while also co-writing Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952) and William Wellman’s TRACK OF THE CAT (1954), alters the focus of the original Mickey Spillane novel, a book he despised, where instead of a mafia drug conspiracy, he adds a new twist of international weapons smugglers who are actually trafficking nuclear weapons.  Conceived out of trashy pulp material, it’s a low-budget B-movie with few emotional attachments that cynically exploits America’s Cold War fear and a 1950’s rising paranoia about the atom bomb, a time when people were urged to build bomb shelters in their back yards.  This film opens with a barefoot woman running down the road at night in a state of panic, flagging down a car wearing only a trenchcoat, which nearly causes a crash, but the driver is none other than Los Angeles private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), whose concern isn’t about the lady in distress, Cloris Leachman in her first feature role as Christina, but the potential damage to his always spotless and buffed convertible Jaguar sports car.  Driving her back into Los Angeles, she cryptically mentions that people are after her, having her institutionalized, and should they not make it back into LA, somehow sensing her death is imminent, she mysteriously urges him to “Remember me.”  Hammer’s car is immediately run off the side of the road where he and the girl are left barely conscious.  They kidnap the girl while Hammer and his car are dropped off a cliff, but he somehow manages to survive.  The girl is not so fortunate, as we hear the distressing sounds of her terrifying screams (and see only her dangling feet) while she is being tortured with a pair of pliers in a place that shall not be named, a prolonged sequence taking place offscreen until she is finally silenced.  This scream typifies the atmospheric mood of horror, but also the degree of sadistic exhibitionism on display.     

The film was not reviewed by the New York Times when it came out, calling it too revolting and utter trash, and it was banned in Great Britain, where the prevalent use of violence is way over the top, made worse by the lead character’s sadistic enjoyment of inflicting pain, where he’s forever slapping people in the face to get information out of them.  Only one guy avoids the inevitable by quickly taking a mouthful of sleeping pills, tipped off by the sounds that Hammer was quickly approaching, so when he got punched and slapped around, it made no difference, as he couldn’t talk because he was completely passed out already.  Transplanted from New York to LA, Hammer’s apartment is spacious and modern, with a tape recording answering device built right into the wall, where strange literary and/or artistic references run throughout the film.  His Girl Friday secretary (Maxine Cooper) has modern ideas about sharing work with pleasure, where Hammer actually pimps out her services, specializing in adulterous divorce cases, his sleazy methods repeated to his face by a police investigator, where he often sleeps with the wife while his secretary Velda seduces the husband, then they extort each one to keep this information from coming out in the court proceedings, where Hammer is forced to admit sarcastically, “All right, you've got me convinced. I'm a real stinker.”  But after a warning from both thugs and cops, Hammer doesn’t scare off this case so easily, thinking the panicked girl must have had something valuable that both the police and the criminal underworld want.  His destroyed car is quickly replaced with another one just as snazzy, but he’s smart enough to find the bomb attached to the ignition, while another explosive device is later found by his over-revved mechanic Nick, Nick Dennis from John Cassavetes’ Too Late Blues (1961), a guy who speaks free form the way he envisions sports cars running, “Va-va-voom!”  When Nick gets snuffed out, Hammer has reason to feel the blues, where a lingering theme throughout is Nat King Cole’s version of  “I’d Rather Have the Blues” KISS ME DEADLY - "I'd Rather Have the Blues" - YouTube (2:54), heard first over a car radio as the opening credits roll backwards, and a second time by a black nightclub singer, Mady Comfort. 

Aldrich wreaks havoc with Hammer’s avenging angel character, already one of the darkest anti-heroes in the film noir genre, turning him into an existential narcissist whose livelihood is exploiting (or blackmailing) others to benefit his own plush lifestyle, where his exaggerated sense of masculinity and individualism, so fascinated with women and fast cars, also having the perfect Hollywood bachelor pad, is in stark contrast to the conservative conformity of the times.  Much of the film is set in the Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles, beautifully shot by Ernst Laszlo in contrasting Black and White, accentuating darkness and shadow throughout, shading the moral line.  While the movie is laced with brutality and corruption, filled with bizarre characters, no one is a more intriguing character than Christina’s frightened roommate, Gaby Rogers as Lily Carver, a television actress appearing in only one other feature film, Joseph Strick’s THE BIG BREAK (1953), eventually marrying the very successful American pop songwriter Jerry Leiber of Leiber and Stoller, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.  Compared to other femme fatales, Carver is initially the most vulnerable character onscreen, appearing sweet and soft and in need of protection from Hammer, fearful and perhaps a bit touched in the head, as if her facilities may not all be there.  But by the end, she’s a changed or transformed woman where her body has literally been inhabited (or killed) by somebody else, becoming someone who is perhaps the most devious character in the entire film, where the personality fissure and apocalyptic finale may remind some viewers of David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY (1997).  Aldrich delights in confusing compositions, odd or oblique camera angles, views down staircases, creating a bleakly disorienting atmosphere of hopelessness and despair, where some nearly always faceless criminal underworld characters involved in international espionage have got their hands on what amounts to THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), where “the bundle,” or “the box” in this case, may be a miniature H-bomb in a suitcase at an oceanfront beach house.  In what is one of the bleakest endings ever, Aldrich may be going to every expressionistic extreme to remind viewers of what’s at stake, where much like Hitchcock in The Birds (1963), he may be targeting the complacency of the populace, as the director uses a somewhat surreal and apocalyptic wake up call to strike back at foolish humans who continue to believe they are exempt from life’s tragedies.