THE RAPE OF EUROPA (Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, Nicole Newnham, 2006)

For all its traditional nature, its reliance on “talking heads” and scripted voiceover narration (read in this instance by actress Joan Allen) as well as archival materials, The Rape of Europa is a tremendous film—a much, much better one than has been grasped despite the near unanimous approval it has garnered. Its subject comprises two activities of the Nazis during the Second World War: the confiscation of art in seven of the countries they invaded—millions of pieces were involved, including some destined for former painter Adolf Hitler’s private collection; the destruction of art, including architecture. One fascinating segment addresses the extraordinary effort that France made to protect its treasures housed in Le Louvre by evacuating them and dispersing them to different chateaux in Southern France—an effort executed by ordinary French citizens as well as people associated with the Paris museum. The film’s most brilliant aspect is hinted by the coordinated efforts to evacuate countless people as well as artwork. This reflects the film’s success at relating the German war against both art and humanity. For instance, the German assault on Polish art derives from German feelings about Polish Slavs, which Germans deem an inferior “race” to themselves: a revelation of the Nazi mindset motivating different aspects of the Nazi program for Europe.
     For me, the most overwhelmingly moving moment occurs about halfway through. An elderly man recalls for the camera what the Nazis had made him do in Paris: sort through and categorize tons of confiscated Jewish property. At a certain point, he came across his own family’s furniture, photographs, and so forth. By this time he had lost all his family, and therefore he secretly took back some of the photographs and kept them for a while—until he was forced to shed them, and everything else, when, his job done, he also was deported to a death camp.
     The ongoing legal battles between museums and the families from whom Nazis originally stole artwork provide a contemporary context in this, it seems to me, essential film.
     From the book by Lynn H. Nicholas, the U.S. film was written and directed by Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham.

CARRIE (William Wyler, 1952)

Victor Milner’s gray, faded black-and-white cinematography suits the mood of Theodore Dreiser’s turn-of-the-century urban naturalism in his dense, painstaking Sister Carrie, from whose title Hollywood excised the first word not to confuse audiences into thinking that the heroine was a nun. Carrie Meeber isn’t that, nor as a nervous Paramount studio or “actress” Jennifer Jones would have it is the film’s Carrie much like the novel’s. Rather than Dreiser’s complex figure, she might as well be a nun, given the sanctified treatment she is accorded here.
     Indeed, William Wyler’s well-upholstered film has also been stripped of its sociopolitical context (to which, beyond family addressing, the first word of Dreiser’s title refers). Now small-town Carrie’s embarkment for the big city, Chicago, is a plot springboard only; in the book, the myths motivating her move make it a thematic springboard as well. Nor is it now clear that Carrie’s “rise” to theatrical prominence, dueting with her older lover, restaurant manager George Hurstwood’s “fall,” is steeped in embittered irony since, despite the hallowed ground that popular culture occupies in our own day, Carrie’s “success” as actress is, at best, ambivalently received in hers.
     I’ve been wrong about something—well, about many things—all my life. Since the release of Carrie, a financial flop, followed the same studio’s money-making release of A Place in the Sun (1951), based on a play based on Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, I presumed that the success of one film emboldened Paramount to make the other. Now I’ve learned that Carrie predated Place but was immediately shelved and doctored to avoid political controversy in the McCarthy era. Therefore, I no longer blame Wyler for the diluted result.
     The one reason to see this film is brilliant Laurence Olivier’s elegant Hurstwood, a gripping slide into degradation.