I watched a movie

The other day I watched an old film, The Train. It was released in 1964, shot in black and white, and stars Burt Lancaster and Paul Scofield. The film takes place in France toward the end of World War II. It centers around the effort of a German colonel, played by Scofield, to transport hundreds of French paintings, by great artists like Picasso, Renoir, Gaugin and Matisse, to Germany to be sold for the war effort. Lancaster plays a French train station director who is also a resistance fighter and who tries to stop the train from reaching Germany.

Several famous French actors, like Jeanne Moreau, have parts, and, in a wonderful small role, Michel Simon.  Simon starred in some of the most hallowed French films, like Boudu Saved From Drowning and L'Atalante.  What a face!  Scofield plays the Nazi colonel with a searing coldness. Lancaster goes all in for his role. There are some great train scenes, hissing steam and power, best I’ve seen. It really is a good movie.

One of the central questions of the movie is: are paintings—and, by inference, art in general—worth dying for? As the train makes its way to the German frontier, resistance fighters sabotage it by blowing up the rails, only to have those rails repaired and the train continue on its way. When the partisans are caught, they’re shot, and in a final scene, twenty or so hostages are shot when the train is derailed for good by Lancaster.

Of course, the film’s question doesn’t solely rest on art itself. The paintings are worth lots of money, and so in this context the resistance fighters are dying to hinder the German war machine.

Still. It’s a rather daring idea for a war film. Blowing up a bridge, sure, an audience can see partisans risking their lives for that. But for a Matisse?

I sometimes consider weighty questions like this when I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Or any museum, really, but this is the one I’m most familiar with. Here you have this vast stone building located on some of New York City’s most spectacular real estate at the edge of Central Park, devoted, to a great extent, to flat, two-dimensional pieces of canvas covered with paint. Room after room, filled with them. Paintings. Just paintings. They don’t do anything. They just are.

No one seems to think that’s a bizarre idea. To devote a train-station-sized building to room after room of paintings.

I certainly don’t. Because this is humankind at its best. This is what we can create at the full measure of our powers. Beauty.

When I go to the Met, I explore its many treasures, and, as anyone who has been there knows, the Museum’s collection of art, of all kinds, seems endless. But I always end up standing before one paining, Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja. The portrait was painted in Rome. It is of Velázquez’s enslaved servant who accompanied Velázquez to Italy.

Juan de Pareja by Velázquez

Velázquez’s painting was part of a big exhibition at the Pantheon. One commentator wrote that the painting "was generally applauded by all the painters from different countries, who said that the other pictures in the show were art but this one alone was truth."

The New York Times film critic at the time wrote about The Train that the viewer is “not likely to be held in great suspense by the peril of a lot of paintings.”

I was, though.