A book by real-life Rose Valland inspired John Frankenheimer's 1964 film, 'The Train,' with Burt Lancaster. Most of the names in the film have been changed, and the mission has been made significantly more romantic.Ĭate Blanchett plays a reluctant-to-cooperate assistant curator from Paris' Jeu de Paume museum. They helped lead to the recovery of about 6 million objects (estimates vary). In truth, more than 300 Allied servicemen and women worked in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program in the final years of the war. Some of the pairings are fitting: Clooney and Damon planning another heist ('Ocean's Thirteen') Dujardin and Goodman back on speaking terms ('The Artist'). The platoon is ill-suited for war but bold in spirit: an art restorer (Matt Damon), an architect (Bill Murray), a sculptor (John Goodman), a British museum head (Hugh Bonneville), a theater producer (Bob Balaban) and a French painting instructor (Jean Dujardin). A handful of museum curators and art experts have been gathered by art historian Frank Stokes (Clooney) to investigate and retake the troves of artwork the Nazis have stolen for a mammoth German museum planned by Hitler.

Only this band of brothers is more like an assembly of academics. Clooney, working from a script he penned with his frequent collaborator Grant Heslov, has fashioned his film as a traditional WWII flick, with a 'Great Escape'-like score by Alexandre Desplat and a sentimental kind of soldierly chumminess.

The 2014 movie stars George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchette, Bill Murray, John Goodman, among others.But while a Michelangelo may be worth dying for, 'The Monuments Men' is, at best, adequately priced as a movie ticket. In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Momuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.įocusing on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day, this fascinating account follows six Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world's great art from the Nazis. ( From the publisher.) The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: 'degenerate' works he despised. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in HistoryĪt the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe.

The Monuments Men by Bret Witter