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.