The Rescue Artist

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Author’s Picks: Best Heist Films, Best Art Crime Books

The Three Best Heist Films

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (1999)

Everything about it is wrong—thieves don’t act like Pierce Brosnan, insurance agents don’t look like Rene Russo, and museums don’t seal themselves off like automated fortresses. But it’s fun.

“If you ever meet an art cop or an art crook and the conversation begins to flag, mention [The Thomas Crown Affair.]”

If you ever meet an art cop or an art crook and the conversation begins to flag, mention this movie. Then stand back. The good guys detest it because it glamorizes the thieves, but the baddies hate it too. Their problem with the film is wounded vanity—tuxedo-clad, art-loving Pierce Brosnan strikes them as a bit effete.

THE GENERAL (1998)

This brilliant, grim film tells the story of Martin Cahill, the Dublin gangster who pulled off what was at the time the biggest art theft ever. Cahill’s criminal career was so hectic that director John Boorman makes quick work of the art heist, but this portrayal of the brutal Cahill shows what a real art thief is like.

One brief scene is an inside joke. The real-life Cahill once broke into Boorman’s house and stole a gold record the director had been awarded for the score of Deliverance. In the course of a burglary in The General, Cahill grabs a gold LP from the wall and then throws it away in disgust when he realizes that it isn’t real gold.

DR.NO (1962)

Well, “best” is pushing it. The first James Bond movie is hard to sit through. But it’s worth seeing for two historic reasons: first, a young Sean Connery; second, Dr. No’s stolen Goya, which helped plant in every crook’s mind the fantasy that if he steals a masterpiece a crooked tycoon will surely want it.

Goya’s portrait of Wellington is now back in the National Gallery in London, where it belongs. The austere label next to the painting omits any mention of the screen credit.

Sean Connery’s more recent heist movie, Entrapment, is less painful though no more plausible.

The Three Best Art Crime Books

THE NAPOLEON OF CRIME: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ADAM WORTH, MASTER THIEF by Ben Macintyre

This nonfiction account of one of the greatest Victorian criminals provides a gorgeous picture of a time when art thieves were truly glamorous. Or at least Adam Worth was. Charley Hill, a stickler for historical accuracy, always felt compelled to interrupt his diatribes about the thuggishness of art thieves to hail the elegant Mr. Worth as the lone counterexample.

“[The Napoleon of Crime] provides a gorgeous picture of a time when art thieves were truly glamorous.”

THE DAY THEY STOLE THE MONA LISA by Seymour Reit

On an August day in 1911 a workman named Vincenzo Perugia walked out of the Louvre with the world’s most famous painting tucked inside his coat. Reit crafts an elaborate story around that simple starting point. The reader will gulp it down with a delight marred only slightly by a single nagging question—is this a true story or a legend?

THE RAPHAEL AFFAIR by Iain Pears

An art historian by training and the author of that acclaimed doorstop of a book An Instance of the Fingerpost, Pears has also written half a dozen less earnest novels that he calls “art history mysteries.” This may be the best.

Several years ago, after a career spent dreaming up art crimes, Pears nearly walked into a real one. On New Year’s Eve 1999 he and a houseful of guests had gathered to ring in the new millennium. Shortly before midnight the baby began to howl. Pears dutifully grabbed baby and stroller and ventured outdoors in the hope that a change of scene would prove soothing. At that moment a thief broke into Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum—only a few blocks from where Pears stood rocking the baby—and ran off into the night with a $4.8 million Cézanne.