The Theft That Made The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Theft Look Like Child’s Play-Burt Lancaster’s “The Train” (1965)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Leslie Dumont
The Train, starring Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne
Moreau, 1965
The world, or at least the art world, those interested in
art anyway is still in wonder, dismay, confusion about how the robbery of a
bunch of extremely valuable paintings including work by Rembrandt and other
masters from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston which after all
these years still have not resurfaced in public. Wonder how what is something
like a half a billion dollars’ worth of art has never seen the light of day. In
some quarters, and not just among the street junkies and hipsters you can make
serious money betting on who ordered the heist, who carried it out and who has
kept the lid on this mystery for so long. Maybe Whitey Bulger went to his recent
merciless grave with the secrets intact, maybe Myles Connors who I interviewed one
night when he was in one of his short time out of jail moments in the role of
President of Rock and Roll when I was a stringer at this publication although that
night was about music not artworks, stolen or not, maybe Sid Larry, who is my
personal chose if for no other reason that he was one of the great night
crawlers of all time and never saw a jail cell. (In the interest of today’s
necessary notice of transparency I have a one thousand dollar bet riding on him
as the villain with his brother Ned, who I dated for a while after Josh Breslin
and I split up.)
(By the way every time patrons goes to the Gardner they are reminded
of the theft by the empty framed spaces where the artwork had been prior to the
theft. The interest in what happened that night and how is still high as a
local Boston NPR continuing series has yet again explored what happened.)
After viewing the film under review, The Train, which is based on a French non-fictional book which has
documented the thefts by the German Army and other allied forces of major
artworks from museums and private collections in France (needless to say and
sadly from Jewish art collectors with a vengeance) as they roamed stealing
everything not nailed down, and some stuff that was, throughout Europe, roamed
particularly through Paris when that city was the epicenter of the art world
before World War II that Gardner heist seems like small potatoes. Moreover, the
Germans thought that their mere possession of the confiscated property meant
that they were entitled to ship the entire looted works back to Germany as the
Allies started their serious counter-offensive in 1944 to take back the night
from the night-takers. This film details ficticously efforts by the French
Resistance to stop the train from leaving the country playing off the real
situation where a Free French officer Rosenberg actually did stop a train
leaving for Germany with a lot of his art dealer and collector father’s
artworks. The real story seems more intriguing in some ways especially since it
has taken the equivalent of a legal civil war to get even some of the art works
back to their rightful owners.
But the storyline here has its own intrigue and its own
sense of logic at a time when the world had gone mad, a time not so very
different than our times, or what could be our times if some social tinder gets
stoked with the current madness afoot in the land. The whole expedition was
planned by one German officer, Waldheim played by Paul Scofield, an art
aficionado who apparently did not care that in Germany most works of modern art,
meaning art by guys like Otto Dix, George Groz, Picasso, Matisse, damn, even innocuous
guys like Degas and Cezanne were “degenerate.” Many a German smoke-filled night
saw such works put to the torch. This mad man German officer was a walking bundle
of contradictions since on the one hand he had something of a snobbish elitist concept
of art and culture as being exclusively the domain of cultured gentlemen like
him. On the other he had no problem killing every opponent who tried to stop
the shipment’s passage to speak nothing of wasting everybody who got in the way
of the German advances to the West, to blood stained Paris earlier in the war
when the Germans seemed invincible. He was more than willing, thought it was
clever, maybe even a brilliant advance for humankind to have civilian hostages
on the locomotive of the train to avoid the damn thing being blown up. Shed not
one tear when he ordered the hostages machine-gunned when he plans went awry,
when he couldn’t get the art out of the country.
Of course such a man needed an adversary, a worthy opponent to
check his every move. A man or a group, here agents of the French Resistance,
who while not having a refined sense of art, maybe even sense that with the
world going to hell in a handbasket that some baubles were not worth the effort
but who nevertheless made the call to arms when some who saw art, great art or
small, an accrual in humankind’s struggle to emerge from the mud took matters
into their own hands to stop the looting of French national treasures. That man,
Lebite, played by ruggedly handsome Burt Lancaster last seen in this space according
to Sam Lowell taking a few unaccounted for slugs over some wayward dame in the film
adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The
Killers, no man of culture, a man who could have given a damn about this
load of art. Except somebody, some comrades, went back down into the mud on
Waldheim’s watch for trying to stop, excuse my English, but my French heritage,
my Quebecois heritage is showing, his fucking train full of loot.
So the chase was on between these two uneven forces. Naturally once the line-up was set up, and knowing the outcome of World War II, Waldheim would not be successful in his thefts, although it really was a close thing. In the end nobody could, or should have, shed tear number one when our French Resistance fighter took one glance at those machine-gunned civilians and wasted Waldheim without remorse, walked away. Yeah, that Gardner Museum heist was peanuts when you think about it-and that is the unvarnished truth.
