This should have been a masterpiece

Rating: 7/10 (11 April 2014)

The film is of course important for the wide popular public who does not know at all anything about that systematic looting of works of arts of any type by the Nazis. The public does not know millions of works of arts are concerned and this operation launched by Roosevelt in 1943 enabled millions of them to be recuperated, maybe not millions but a great, great number. Note Roosevelt knew about art and culture, but it is sure Truman did not know the word, let alone the "thing."
The film is important to show that this operation could only succeed if it was American, English and French at once since it was supposed to follow the front starting in Normandy just after D day and prevent the Nazis from doing what Hitler had ordered: destroy everything you can. Leave behind you a devastated and burnt out land. And actually we have a mistake in the film when it pretends the objective of Hitler was to destroy European culture.
In fact the objective was to take possession of all they could and put it up in a Führer Museum in Hitler's birth place in Austria. Hitler wanted to alienate the Europeans of their culture and force them to come humble and trembling to this museum to see what once was theirs. That was in fact even more cruel than just destroying it since it was not turning Europeans into deculturalized slaves but into zoo animals coming to see what they used to be. And when they were reduced to zoo animals then it was a lot easier to shoot them point blank but with live ammunition.
But there is also another shortcoming that is in fact ideological. The decision to destroy all those works of art was a final war measure from Hitler, but it became in the film a way not to speak of something else. The fact that millions of works of arts were plainly stolen in a way or another by plain ordinary people, like the neighbors who looted the apartment of a Jewish family that had just been arrested. Ot this Jewish family that survived in France from beginning to end by going from one hiding place to the next and paying their passage with some silverware. And we must not forget the duly paid for SNCF trains to transport everything imaginable from human deported people to treasures or ammunitions and troops.
And it also neglects the fact that a great number of works of art were saved by simple people who recuperated them in due time and hid them away like the tapestries of La Chaise Dieu to bring them back out once the war was finished, or even a long time later like the bronze sculptures of the Quinconces in Bordeaux that only reappeared in the 1980s.
The saving of the Bruges Madonna by Michel Ange and of the Ghent altarpiece just before the arrival of the Russians, is kind of cold war in spirit ahead of history, especially since this salvation was in fact possible because the local German miners had blown up the three entrances of the mine to prevent the Nazis from doing what they intended to do. Here gain the message is fuzzy. Millions of Europeans risked their life to save someone or something that was considered as valuable because the Nazis wanted them. The popular dimension is mostly ignored and reduced to anecdotal little facts, even with Claire who actually did a tremendous work to list the immensity of the spoils. Only this last case is given some prominence, but it was not possible without a very serious organization behind and under this surface.
In other words this film could have been a master piece but it only speaks of masterpieces without being one. Sorry for it. Clooney could have done a lot more and better with a little bit of research.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU