A Small Piece of the Story of Art Looted or Destroyed by the Nazis

Rating: 7/10 (4 May 2020)

Odd that no one ever made this movie 60 years ago. "The Monuments Men" assembles a cast in very much the way as post-World War II films like "Command Decision," which brought together Clark Gable, Walter Pidgeon, Van Johnson, Brian Donlevy, Charles Bickford, John Hodiak, and Edward Arnold in a compelling but largely forgotten study of the military vs. politics. Forgotten in much the same way "The Monuments Men" is likely to be forgotten in 60 years, even thought it stars George Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murrary, Jean DuJardin, Kate Blanchette, Bob Balaban, and Hugh Bonneville.
You have to give director and star Clooney credit for bringing to the screen this tale, based on historical events, of a group of art experts drafted into the military to recover paintings and sculpture looted from across Europe by the invading Nazis. Their sacrifice, their harrowing mission, saved countless works of art destined for destruction by Hitler and his team of vandals, who believed that if they couldn't have them nobody else would either.
I was reading "The Clarinet Polka" by Keith Maillard, a 2002 novel that's been waiting on my bookshelf for a dozen years. In this wickedly funny book about life in a Polish community in West Virginia, I read on page 107: "To Mrs. Dluwiecki, everything that was good and true and beautiful was Poland before the war. She went on and on about the beautiful china and crystal and silver her family used to have, and all the oil paintings that'd been in the family for generations. She remembered all the fancy outfits she'd ever worn, and she described them to Janice down to the finest detail. She even remembered things like her white veil and her little white shoes from her first Communion that she'd saved in a special wooden box, and the little silver scissors her mother had used to cut the roses-and all that beautiful stuff was gone, lost, plundered by the Germans. She didn't even have any photographs from those days. She said she'd lost her precious heritage and all she had left was memory." And so it was with millions of Poles-Jews and Gentiles-who lost their heritage, their homes, and six million of them their lives in the Holocaust. I put the book on the coffee table and went to see "The Monuments Men."
Set in France and Germany, it was disappointing that "The Monuments Men" mentioned Poland only once in the entire film when early on George Clooney, as leader of the group, explains that the Nazis have been "stealing art from Amsterdam, Warsaw, and Paris." Historically, the Allies never came to Poland's rescue, and the movie shows the Americans narrowly missing the Russian army as it advanced into Germany, having already "liberated" (meaning taken over) Poland. Late in the film we see, but only if we are alert enough to notice, that Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady with an Ermine" (now hanging in the Czatoryski Museum in Krakow) is one of the paintings these brave men recovered.
Historically interesting and beautiful to watch, "The Monuments" Men somehow falls short of generating in the audience the kind of passion for art that possessed the lead characters. How much more compelling this film would have been in the hands of Poland's great director Andrzej Wajda.