Philadelphia Weekly

The plundering of one-fifth of Europe's art by the Nazis inspired both the John Frankenheimer action pic The Train and an unusually action-oriented episode of The Simpsons. But even the real stuff is pretty thrilling.

The Rape of Europa is odd on two fronts: It's based on a nonfiction book--Lynn H. Nichols' eponymous 500-page bestseller--and adapted into not a fiction account but a straight-up documentary. It's also a documentary that's, in its way, as exciting as any superior Hollywood product.

Anyone who's seen the doc Stolen--about the theft in 1990 of 35 works from Boston's Stewart Gardner museum, still an open case after all these years--knows art looting is unexpectedly thrilling stuff, even when as here, it's done in the style of a History Channel slot-filler.

Directed by a three-person committee, Europa is a stylistically dry and staid affair. It has nothing as out-there as Stolen's eyepatch-and-bowler-hat-wielding detective (though it does have a better villain). But the doc is still a lurid potboiler with Adolf Hitler as both an avid collector and a failed painter out for revenge on the world that denied him admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

Bitter and vindictive, Hitler launched a special department for "the seizure and securing of objects of cultural value," and partly mapped his conquest of the continent based on what swag he could score. (And none of this modern art shit--Hitler was a connoisseur of classical portraits and landscapes by the old masters, particularly those of German birth, deeming anything contemporary as "degenerate art.")

By their defeat, the Nazis had swiped hundreds of thousands of cultural objects and hidden them in salt mines and caves, all while reducing the museums that formerly stored them to rubble.

But that's just the beginning. Like Nichols' book, Europa casts a net over a surprisingly vast and rich topic, eventually following the story into the recovery efforts, which are arguably even more fascinating. It's certainly rife with anecdotes, many of them possessing the thrills and spills of a classic adventure yarn.

As war was waged, one eye was always on the artworks, with the Allies (or some of them, at least) being careful about where they stepped, even bringing art experts right up to the front lines. Certain pieces were deemed so fragile they could barely be rescued, or were scuffed up beyond repair. Decades before Rumsfeld's smart bombs, the Allies bombed Florence so strategically they narrowly missed the city's monuments--only for the Germans, upon defeat, to blow up the Michelangelo-designed bridges as they left.

Other tales--like one about a strategically placed Italian monastery that required its very own bloody battle to be overtaken--apply a more ethical spin, reiterating the old question: In a burning building, do you save Shakespeare's works or a human life?

That specific, mind-clearing conundrum hangs over the whole of Europa, as Nazi plunder seems like a hill of beans when compared to their other atrocities. Europa knows this, and some of the film's interviewees tend to look at the looting as mere insult to injury: Not only were the Nazis genocidal, but they stole Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man! (It's still missing.)

And yet the film doesn't undervalue art or give it a short shrift. Europa understands the importance and vitality of art as both work to be appreciated and as a direct pipeline to the past.

Besides, the plundering has clear modern-day effects. Europa is bookended by the present, where more than 100,000 items are still wrangled in legal purgatory--that is, if their whereabouts are even known. These headaches take up Europa's present-day dealings, notably the case of Maria Altmann, who only last year won back her Viennese family's collection of Gustav Klimt works. (That includes Adele Bloch-Bauer I, a depiction of Altmann's aunt and currently the highest-selling painting in history.)

Where docs like Murderball or this week's War Dance try to ape mainstream styles to make real-life stories more "entertaining," Europa understands that the best way to elicit audience engagement is simply serving the story.

The Rape of Europa
B
Director: Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham.
Opens Fri., Nov. 30