Monuments Men

The monuments men : Allied heroes, Nazi thieves, and the greatest treasure hunt in history.
Edsel, Robert M. New York, N.Y. : Center Street, 2009.

I had never heard of these people (almost every single one a man), nor of their work. Nor of this book. I do remember seeing commercials about the film. A couple of weeks ago a Peninsula Library patron highly recommended I read the book, so I took it out.

It started weak, but immediately got good and strong. A team of art experts was charged with saving the art treasures of Europe that Nazis had stolen. How they went about it is little short of miraculous. Well written book, fast paced, yet a disappointing last chapter fizzles. Nonetheless, a wonderful book.

This is a sample of the writing style, which I enjoyed greatly, and of the people:

“George Stout, who had taught Kirstein at Harvard during his graduate years, was aware of the brilliance of the new private. He was also, probably aware of his shortcomings: his easy frustration, his mood swings, and his distaste for army life. Whether by accident or design — and knowing Stout it was almost surely by design — Kirstein was assigned the perfect  partner: Monuments Man Robert Posey of George Patton’s Third Army.

    If ever there was an odd couple, it was Posey and Kirstein: a quiet, blue-collar Alabama architect and a manic-depressive, married yet homosexual, Jewish New York bon vivant. Posey was steady, while Kirstein was emotional. Posey was a planner, Kirstein impulsive. Posey was disciplined, his partner outspoken. Posey was thoughtful, but Kirstein was insightful, often brilliantly so. While Posey only requested Hershey’s bars from home, Kirstein care packages included smoked cheeses, artichokes, salmon, and copies of the New Yorker.

    Together, the two men could go a lot further in the army than either could go alone.” (225)

Kirstein was a surprise; well, so were the others. These men did great things, and they are unknown. Alas, the film seems to be a sanitized, prettified version. But, such is Hollywood.

The extent of Nazi looting was staggering. No just paintings and sculptures (and, in fairness, it is pointed out that half of the French museums holdings were plunder from Napoleon's military campaigns). They stole church bells, too. Personal belongings, and not just of Rothschilds. Not content to have stolen in victory, they planned to destroy in defeat. Thanks in great part to the Monuments Men, such crimes were not added to the heinous toll.

Bridge at Remagen (1969)

Recommended by PN patron. George Segal emotes, does nice job as Army leiutenant leading a squad spearheading US advance across the Rhine. Ben Gazzara does good job as a cynical soldier who is, nevertheless, a crack shot and fearless. Robert Vaughn slightly overplays role as German major sent to hold the last standing bridge crossing the Rhine. Hitler has ordered the bridge to be blown up, even though that will strand 75,000 German soldiers. Despite efforts to hold bridge, an unofficial order given to vaughn's character by his commanding general,  he finally decides to blow it up, only to hVe the dynamite he was sent for the jon turn out to ne defective. In next to last scene, Vaughn's major is shot by firing squad. Film tried to show war was more than just shooting, anticipating "Saving Private Ryan" by three decades. Very good war movie.

Ernie Pyle's story of G.I. Joe

In the February 13 & 20, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, David Denby wrote a side Critic's Notebook column: Soldiering On, in which he praised this film. He called it "probably the grimmest and most poetic and the least tied to genre clichés." Grim and freee of clichés it is, indeed; poetic I am not sure sure about, but I can understand what he meant.

"Sombre, slightly maddened, fatalistic," it follows a unit to which Ernie Pyle attaches himself, as it fights in North Africa, then Italy. There is little staged heroism, or any other clichéd action. The film catches the cruelty of war in both its random and fatal violence, and its endless boredom. Burgess Meredith seems miscast as Ernie Pyle, and does his best to rescue his effort. Robert Mitchum plays a lieutenant who handles his assignment (which includes sending men to their deaths) with a soft touch. A sergeant in the unit receives a 45rpm recording of his son's voice, but can not find a way to play it. When he finally finds a victrola, it has no needle. His attempt to fashion a replacement is not only futile but maddening: each time he tries to listen to it, the record plays at the wrong speed and his frustration builds and builds.

Interesting film-making. John Wayne stinks.

Everything is illuminated

Wonderful film. Not everyone agrees, of course. In the NYT, AO Scott pans it: Mr. Foer's verbal and imaginative energies brought him close to succeeding. Mr. Schreiber, plucking a single thread of the novel's interwoven narratives, shows himself to be a sincere and serious reader, but his effort at translation does not quite work. Taken on its own, without comparison with its literary source, the movie, Mr. Schreiber's first as writer and director, is thin and soft, whimsical when it should be darkly funny and poignant when it should be devastating.

Roger Ebert liked it: The gift that Schreiber brings to the material is his ability to move us from the broad satire of the early scenes to the solemnity of the final ones. For Grandfather, this is as much a journey of discovery as it is for Jonathan, and the changes that take place within him are all the more profound for never once being referred to in his dialogue. He never discusses his feelings or his memories, but in a way he is the purpose of the whole trip. The conclusion he draws from it is illustrated in an image that, in context, speaks more eloquently than words.  'Everything is Illuminated" is a film that grows in reflection. The first time I saw it, I was hurtling down the tracks of a goofy ethnic comedy when suddenly we entered dark and dangerous territory. I admired the film but did not sufficiently appreciate its arc. I went to see it again at the Toronto Film Festival, feeling that I had missed some notes, had been distracted by Jonathan's eyeglasses and other relative irrelevancements (as Alex might say). The second time, I was more aware of the journey Schreiber was taking us on, and why it is necessary to begin where he begins in order to get where he's going.

Along the way there are some gems, a lot of humor (especially in the early parts), and a lot of beautiful countryside.

They travel, grandfather Alex driving, grandson Alex riding shotgun, Jonathan in the back seat with Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. At one juncture they pass by an old concrete box of a building, many windows broken, seemingly abandoned. Jonathan asks about it.

"Soviet," says Alex.
"What happened?" asks Jonathan.
"Independence."

As they seek out the woman in a faded photograph that Jonathan carries, a memento from his grandmother, showing his grandfather and a woman that grandmother told him saved his grandfather, they are hurtling into the past. When Jonathan remarks that his grandmother told him that Ukrainians were so anti-Semitic, that, at first, Jews thought the Germans might be an improvement, Alex is incredulous. He asks his own grandfather about that, and grandfather Alex says nothing, but his haunted look speaks to something his silence does not. But, what is it? Was he a Nazi collaborator? Or?

In the end, the answer is obvious. I cringed several times at the sight of German soldiers loading bullets into their rifles, Jews lined up mere yards away, about to be massacred. Yet the sounds never appeared; that technique worked beautifully: there is no need to state, let alone overwork, the obvious: Nazis killed Jews. But other things happened, too. The film tells one such story.

Tuskegee airmen

Rather good, even if a little labored.

Yankee Doodle Dandy - 1942

Corn-pone, but Cagney somehow pulls it off. He portarys George M. Cohan, and the flags never stop waving.

How It Went

Not too well, from the sounds of it. The first paragraph of the review is startling.

Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, but one gets the sense from Charles J. Shields’s sad, often heartbreaking biography, “And So It Goes,” that he would have been happy to depart this vale of tears sooner. Indeed, he did try to flag down Charon the Ferryman and hitch a ride across the River Styx in 1984 (pills and booze), only to be yanked back to life and his marriage to the photographer Jill Krementz, which, in these dreary pages, reads like a version of hell on earth. But then Vonnegut’s relations with women were vexed from the start. When he was 21, his mother successfully committed suicide — on Mother’s Day.

Oops.

Vonnegut’s masterpiece was “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the novelistic account of being present at the destruction of Dresden by firebombing in 1945. Between that horror (his job as a P.O.W. was to stack and burn the corpses); the mother’s suicide; the early death of a beloved sister, the only woman he seems truly to have loved; serial unhappy marriages; and his resentment that the literary establishment really considered him (just) a writer of juvenile and jokey pulp fiction, Vonnegut certainly earned his status as Man of Sorrows, much as Mark Twain, to whom he is often compared, earned his.

Yikes.

Vonnegut and the other great “comic” (or if you prefer, ironic or tragico-comical-ironic) novelist of World War II, Joseph Heller, are getting their biographical due, almost simultaneously.There are some odd synergies. The two met years after their wars, onstage at a literary festival in 1968, and became great friends and eventually neighbors. Heller’s war was up in the air, as a bombardier in the nose cone of a B-25. Vonnegut’s was at ground level, as an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge, and ultimately beneath ground level, in the basement of Schlachthof-Fünf during the firebombing. In a detail that struck me as, well, weird, Vonnegut’s breakthrough moment while he was trying to get a handle on how to write his novel came during a visit to a war buddy — in Hellertown, Pa. More ironic is that both World War II novels ended up being Vietnam novels.

Fascinating review. I read Vonnegut. And I saw him once, on the stoop of a townhouse on 48th Street (I think it was), around the corner from 3rd Avenue; he'd come outside, with a little white poodle, I think, smoking a cigarette, and sat on the stoop. He saw me recognize him, and shrugged.

Into the storm

Followup to The gathering storm, with Alberty Finney as Winston and Vanessa Redgrave as Clementine. Brendan Gleeson overplays his role; then again, the script looks for nigh every Churchill cliché, and tries to stuff them all in. Len Cariou plays an unconvincing FDR, who comes off as second banana. Now, this is a film about Churchill, but FDR was never second banana to him. Janet McTeer was a revelation; her Clemmie was as good as imaginable, strong, not at all overplayed, convincing.

A bridge too far

Film version of Cornelius Ryan's book. Cast includes Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, and Edward Fox, as well as Elliot Gould, Laurence Olivier and Liv U. Not a happy story, but a good war movie.

Terrible Terry Allen

Having come across this book, and then across Allen's name, I thought this would be a wonderful book to read. Alas, it wasn't. I stopped, having skipped many pages. I found the writing style disagreeable.

Man in the middle

Not quite sure why I picked out this film, but I have always liked Robert Mitchum. Here he plays an army lifer who gets called to a joint American-British theater during the Second World War (keeping with the theme of my currently reading H.W. Brands's biography of FDR, Traitor to his class), and is asked to provide a credible defense for a GI who has murdered a Brit in cold blood in front of numerous witnesses. Mitchum pays Lt. Col. Barney Adams; he has been summoned by General Kempton (played by another favorite, Barry Sullivan), a friend's of his father (an off-screen senior Adams). Col. Adams reluctantly accepts the assignment, and then pursues all leads, in order to provide a vigorous defense.

Adams refuses to accept what is obviously a coverup. Along the way he meets a nurse, Kate Davray (played by France Nuyen), who provides him with evidence he is, at first, reluctant to accept. What he is not reluctant to do is pursue Nurse Davray, in a 1963 sort of way.

There is much cigarette smoking, much alcohol drinking. Adams defiantly pursues a vigorous defense that even his client, played with a slightly too-heavy hand that almost descends to schtick by Keenan Wynn. Mitchum does a deft job of acting, and fully extends the role. Trevor Howard underplays a British psychiatrist who has been shunted to dispensing medicines, exiled from his true work. Cynical, Major Kensington comes to the rescue of Adams, whose every attempt to get at the truth is frustrated by roadblocks thrown in his way even by his sponsor, General Kempton.

Adams finally accepts Nurse Davray's evidence, and, along with Kensington's corroborating evidence, wins the case. Nicely done.

Occupied France: 5 Books

1. Occupation 944.0816 O
By Ian Ousby
St. Martin's Press, 1997

Nothing can be more degrading for a nation than to be occupied. In the case of France, the German Occupation even extended to the ancient practice of hauling people off to be slaves -- in this case as forced laborers in German factories. Ian Ousby's "Occupation" is an outstanding introduction to this horrible-fascinating subject. The author's apparent disqualifications -- not a historian and not a scholar of French history -- are the very qualities that make him an excellent guide for the general reader who knows nothing about the subject and wants lucid answers to the simple questions: What really happened, what was heroic, what was shameful, and in what proportions did they flourish in the same soil and why?



2. Vichy France 320.944 P and 944.0816 P *
By Robert O. Paxton
Knopf, 1972

Nearly four decades ago, Robert O. Paxton's "Vichy France" touched off what came to be regarded as a sort of Copernican revolution in studies of French collaboration. Paxton was the first to show that the collaborationist policy of the French government in occupied France was voluntary -- even, as with Vichy's anti-Semitism, anticipating and going further than the Germans had asked. Paxton's classic inspired young French scholars, opening the way to a flood of works that seems to widen with the passage of time. Justice done? Far from it. French television regularly broadcasts fictional stories of the Resistance but rarely one of collaboration. A year ago, President Nicolas Sarkozy said in an address to his nation: "The true France was not at Vichy [and] never collaborated." Official myth and historic fact continue to live side by side. And shame persists.

3. France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 [also gets differing Deweys: 944.0816 J, 940.5421 J]
By Julian Jackson
Oxford, 2001

This is the fullest one-volume account of both the high politics of Vichy and the daily life of the French populace, written by Julian Jackson, an eminent authority on the Occupation. One of the book's many virtues is the honest way it explores the subtleties and complexities of "collaborationism." Was a mayor, honest and efficient before the Occupation, a collaborator for continuing to be an honest and efficient mayor under the Nazis? Was the owner of a factory making equipment for the Germans guilty of collaboration for keeping his plant going so that his employees could earn money to buy food? "France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944" is densely packed with fact and analysis and may be too detailed for some readers, but it is an indispensable reference work for anyone interested in the topic.

4. Paris in the Third Reich
By David Pryce-Jones
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981

After having been stranded in 1940 in France as a 4-year-old, David Pryce-Jones returned to the country many years later to write this eminently readable and marvelously illustrated large-format book about daily life in the capital during wartime. The text concludes with a number of historically valuable interviews with German Occupation officials and some key collaborators. The book includes more than 100 photographs, many of them in color, rare at the time. But reader beware: Some of the photos are by André Zucca, a collaborationist photographer for Signal, a magazine established by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to convey the idea that occupied France was a happy place. An exhibition in Paris last year of 250 of these photographs created a scandal, demonstrating how the Occupation remains a raw subject to this day.

5. Occupied France
By H.R. Kedward
Blackwell, 1985

In a mere 80 pages, studded with shrewd observations distilled from years of study, H.R. Kedward, now an emeritus professor at the University of Sussex, takes the reader through the Occupation at a gallop. Collaboration and resistance began the same day -- the moment the armistice was signed on June 22, 1940 -- and Kedward shows that from the start, the two responses to German rule had myriad meanings and myriad practitioners. Blacks and whites shade into gray in this account, but true villains and true heroes remain. Resistance, whether refusing to speak to a German on the street or committing acts of violent sabotage, may often have been ineffective, but it was a vital help to Allied forces come D-Day. The central lesson of "Occupied France" and the other titles is simple. Collaboration -- like appeasement before it -- failed totally because it willfully misread Hitler's intentions.

Mr. Spotts is the author of "The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Occupation" (Yale University Press, 2009)

*: 320.944 P and 944.0816 P
An interesting commentary on libraries and cataloguing. Same book is classified in two different ways: 320 is political science; 944 is General history of Europe; France & Monaco.

2 biographies

The fly swatter: how my grandfather made his way in the world. (2002). Nicholas Dawidoff.
New York: Pantheon Books.



















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