New movie The Brain of the Operation (The Mastermind), starring Josh O'Connor, tells the story of an art heist gone wrong.
It was inspired by a wave of similar thefts during a period known as the Decade of Upheaval.
In May 1972, two men entered the Worcester Museum of Art in Massachusetts and hurried out carrying four paintings by Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and an alleged Rembrandt (now believed to be the work of one of his students), holding a group of visiting high school students at gunpoint and shooting a security guard along the way.
With stolen artworks valued at a total of two million dollars, the New York Times ranked it among the largest art thefts in modern times.
Some even say that this theft inspired a much more serious crime that took place nearby: the 1990 robbery of Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which stole $500 million worth of loot, making it by far the most expensive theft in American history, and the crime remains unsolved to this day.
The Worcester heist was masterminded by seasoned criminal Florian "Al" Monday, but it all went wrong when the two thieves he hired for the break-in began showing off their exploits in a local bar.
Within a month, the paintings were safely retrieved from the Rhode Island pig farm and returned to the gallery.
"To make things even crazier, Monday, before he became an art thief, had a band, and I own a single from his record," writer and director Kelly Reichardt tells the BBC.
Her new film The Mastermind, which recently premiered in the US, was inspired by the chain of events that followed the Worcester theft, as well as the wave of art thefts that occurred during the same decade.
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Praised by The Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw for finding "unglamorousness" in the heist, Kelly Reinhardt's intelligent film breaks the usual rules of the glamorous, sensationalized heist film.
Blockbusters have long popularized the idea that there is something classy about this category of crime, especially when it involves art: think, for example, of the 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair, in which Pryce Brosnan plays a suave billionaire who organizes a raid on New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Rajhard's version of the genre opts for a slower pace and a more precise eye for the way the art heist unfolds cataclysmically.
Josh O'Connor takes on the title role as the mastermind behind the entire operation: J.B. Mooney, a middle-class, well-educated failed art student who is now struggling as an unemployed carpenter in Massachusetts.
Under pressure from his wealthy parents - a retired judge (Bill Kemp) and a high-society lady (Hope Davis) - to repay their debts, he chooses the fictional Framingham Museum of Art for his heist.
But from the moment one of his men asks how he plans to resell the stolen art, which is difficult due to their recognizability, the plan goes awry.
Reichard came across a text about the 50th anniversary of the Wurster Art Museum robbery while working on a previous film. showing up (2002), a comedy-drama about two rival sculptors, and decided to use the story as the basis for her next feature film.
All that's left is to create the character of JB.
"Political ideas, genre ideas - these are things you think about and study, but then you have to let go of all that and concentrate on the details of the film you're making and what your character's situation is," Reichart says.
"If you start getting into the details of a robbery like this and don't focus on the bigger picture, then by nature it all becomes deglamorized."
While reading about the 1972 robbery, Reinhardt recalled "numerous break-ins and thefts from that era" that often appeared in the news.
Just a few months after the Worcester Art Museum robbery, a robbery dubbed the "skylight robbery" was carried out in Canada.
Three armed robbers broke into the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and stole paintings, jewelry and valuables worth $2 million, making it the largest theft in the country's history.
On the other side of the Atlantic, in 1976, 119 of Picasso's late works were stolen from the French Papal Palace by three thieves while they were on display at a visiting exhibition.
Then there's the case of Rose Dugdale, an Oxford University graduate and heiress turned fierce Irish republican, the subject of Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy's high-octane art theft drama called Baltimore.
In 1974, along with several other members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), she stole 19 paintings by such big names as Johannes Vermeer and Peter Paul Rubens from Ireland's Rusborough House, and demanded a ransom for them, hoping to secure the release of imprisoned IRA members.
"There was something very well-organized about it and something very poorly thought out."
"They were extremely motivated, but completely blind to the broader political reality," Lolor told Sineuropa.
History of art theft
Before this spate of robberies, there had been countless other robberies and thefts of prized works of art throughout history, from the pirate theft of Hans Memling's The Last Judgment in 1473 from a ship that was supposed to
to sail for France, until the infamous theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911 by Vincenzo Peruggia, a disillusioned former gallery employee.
When he was caught two years later, he served only six months of his prison sentence.
Yet the Massachusetts robbery undoubtedly signaled a change of pace for the art theft industry.
According to art historian Tom Flynn, the rise in robberies in the 1970s "coincided with a boom in the art market."
Citing the launch of Antiques Roadshow in 1977 - a long-running BBC TV show in which a team of experts appraises works of art and objects - and its subsequent popularity, Flynn says: "It was a cultural shift, when we started to see works of art as equivalent to money."
Meanwhile, criminals were becoming increasingly aware of the fragility of museum security, making works of art seem like easy targets.
News reports in the early 1970s warned of "crises" in museum funding and cuts in security, especially amid high inflation.
Small-scale robberies, such as the theft of Francisco Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington from London's National Gallery in 1961 and the disappearance of three Rembrandts from the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1966, have shown how easy it can be to simply steal a painting from a gallery wall without being noticed.
Like the guard injured during the robbery at the Worcester Art Museum, security guards rarely carried weapons - and as is mockingly portrayed in The Brain, they could often be sleepy "retirees" or "tablet addicts," as Reichard puts it, with very limited training behind them.
"Museums used to have attractive roundabouts in front, which only made escape even easier," she adds.
And although the film features an FBI art crime investigator who resembles real-life agent Robert Whitman, who recovered $300 million worth of art during his career, the FBI's real art crime team was only established in 2004.
But as Flynn points out, while museums may have been slow to recognize the threat of looting in the past, thieves generally weren't exactly as shrewd either.
"The history of art crime and large-scale art theft is littered with opportunistic idiots who don't really understand the nature of art itself," he says, referring to their potential to cause harm.
"Or, to be more precise, the art markets. And then these guys discover, to their great horror, that the objects they've stolen are very difficult to drown," he says.
The appeal of art thieves
The archetype of the artist thief in fiction as a sympathetic outcast also began to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s.
Amid the unrest sparked by the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration, disillusionment and dissatisfaction reached new levels, especially among younger generations in the United States.
At the same time, films such as Topkapi from 1964 (in which a gang of thieves tries to steal artwork from a palace in Istanbul), How to steal a million from 1966 (in which Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole plan a robbery out of altruistic motives) and First move from the same year (starring Michael Caine as a daring burglar who steals an ancient bust) helped glorify such characters.
According to historian Susan Ronald, who specializes in art world crime, the rise of the art thief in pop culture reflects the anti-authoritarian mentality of the time.
"Part of the appeal of these characters is that they outsmart the establishment," she explains.
"The fact that art thefts usually don't involve private individuals makes it more acceptable."
"It's an institution and there's something quite daring about it all."
Perhaps in part, the glorification of these art thieves has led to misconceptions about these thefts - for example, the idea that it is a "victimless crime".
"We don't take it seriously enough," Flynn says.
"That's why criminals often get ridiculously short sentences, when you consider that they committed a serious crime against culture."
"But because it's art, we don't think it's important."
The brain of the operation tries in various ways to overthrow entrenched ideas about art looters.
From Kane to The first move to Alain Delon in Red circle Jean-Pierre Melville (1970), such a personality was often portrayed as a heartbreaker in films of that time.
But with JB, Reichardt hoped to turn that around.
"These characters are actually big jerks. They are misogynists. They can afford to disappear and do whatever they want. Even their children don't keep them in the house, with their families.
"The very idea that you can be an outcast is a privilege, but you end up rooting for them, because it's just a narrative issue."
We get a complex perspective on JB's character through his long-suffering wife, Terri (Alana Haim), and unimpressed studio colleague Maude (Gabby Hoffman), both of whom are forced to put up with his antics.
"Occasionally there is an added, more objective portrayal of him through the women in JB's life who he counts on, who are burdened by his freedom."
"Personal freedom is a huge issue in American politics today, but at what cost and who bears the consequences?"
Robberies of public museums and galleries are much less common today, because criminals are now "committed to the fact that these are essential objects that cannot be drowned," says Flynn.
However, recent cuts in US government funding could spell trouble for museum security in the future, despite the greater threats to paintings these days, says cultural heritage consultant Vernon Repli.
"It won't just be security that will suffer - it will also be the fabric of the buildings themselves."
"If you don't invest in roofs and windows, eventually weather and climate change will probably pose a greater risk to art objects than criminals."
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