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  • Featured Movies
    • 12 Years a Slave (2013)
    • 1941 (Spielberg) >
      • 1941: Part 2
    • Affair of the Necklace
    • Alice's Restaurant: best of the American counterculture movies?
    • Army of Crime
    • Army of Shadows
    • The Artist >
      • 'The Artist':2
    • Anthropoid: the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, 1942: Four Very Different Movies >
      • Hangmen Also Die: Hollywood meets emigres from Nazi Germany
    • Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
    • Battle of the Rails ( La bataille du rail)
    • Belle (2014)
    • Bhowani Junction
    • Blackboard Jungle >
      • Blackboard Jungle Pt.2
    • Carry On Up the Khyber
    • Charlie Wilson's War
    • The City Across the River
    • The Counterculture : best movies about the American counterculture era
    • Custer - two contrasting movie portrayals: "They Died With Their Boots On" and "Little Big Man" >
      • They Died With Their Boots On
      • Stalin and the Movies >
        • Stalin, Disney, Eisenstein, & Ivan the Terrible
      • Death of Stalin
      • Little Big Man (1970)
    • Dark Knight Rises >
      • Dark Knight Rises Pt.2
    • The Deceivers
    • Diplomacy / Diplomatie (2014) movie
    • Dunkirk: Christopher Nolan's epic movie
    • El Cid
    • The Enigma Machine : four movies about the Enigma machine
    • Generation War >
      • Generation War: Jazz and the Swing Kids
      • Generation War: German women and the war
    • The Great Gatsby On the Big Screen
    • Gunga Din
    • A Hard Day's Night: Influences on the Movie
    • Hemingway & Gellhorn >
      • Martha Gellhorn >
        • Women war correspondents
    • Hyde Park on Hudson
    • The Imitation Game (2014) >
      • The Imitation Game Part 2: the truth about Turing and the Bletchley 'Bombe'. >
        • The Imitation Game: Turing, Bletchley and the Colossus >
          • Imitation Game: Turing, Bletchley Park and the Soviet spy
    • The Inner Circle (1991)
    • Is Paris Burning? >
      • Is Paris Burning? General von Choltitz
    • KIng of the Khyber Rifles
    • Kim
    • Léon Morin, Priest
    • Les Miserables (2012) >
      • Les Miserables in Movies: Fantine the grisette >
        • Les Miserables 3: guide to some historical references
    • "Les Misérables": Claude Lelouch updates a classic
    • Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)
    • The Long Duel
    • Looking at Lincoln - Spielberg's "Lincoln" & its predecessors and influences >
      • Spielberg's Lincoln
      • Abraham Lincoln: D.W. Griffith's version
      • Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
      • Abe Lincoln in Illinois
    • Mandingo (1975) Dir: Richard Fleischer
    • The Man Who Would Be King
    • Marie Antoinette (2006)
    • Marie-Antoinette / Shadow of the Guillotine
    • Farewell, My Queen
    • Marie Antoinette (1938) >
      • Marie Antoinette (1938) Pt.2
    • Mayerling
    • Midnight in Paris >
      • Midnight in Paris:2 >
        • Midnight in Paris:3
    • The Monuments Men (2014) Dir: George Clooney
    • North West Frontier / Flame Over India
    • La Nuit de Varennes - a post-modern take on a key episode in the French Revolution
    • Le Pere Tranquille (The Quiet Father) 1946
    • Peterloo: MIke Leigh's New Movie >
      • Peterloo2
    • Pompeii in the movies >
      • Pompeii (2014) Paul W.S. Anderson director
    • Rebel Without a Cause
    • Ridicule
    • Scott Fitzgerald Goes to Hollywood
    • Sergeant Rutledge
    • Silence of the Sea
    • Swing Kids (1993)
    • The Train
    • Train to Pakistan
    • Stranglers of Bombay
    • Tonka
    • Tulip Fever
    • Viceroy's House
    • The Vikings
    • Vietnam Westerns: western movies and the Vietnam war
    • Wee Willie Winkie
    • The Wind and the Lion
    • Woman in Gold >
      • Woman in Gold Pt.2: the Vienna Scene in early 20th Century Vienna
    • Un village française: French TV series
    • Waterloo: the movie about Napoleon's final battle
    • Zabriskie Point
  • Places
    • Settings: the North West Frontier
    • Movies Set in the North-West Frontier >
      • Thuggees
    • Movies Set in Paris and Versailles
  • Events
    • Events That Inspired Movies 2
    • French Resistance and Collaboration in World War II: Selected Movies
  • People
    • People Part 2
  • Music
    • Rock Around the Clock
    • Don't Knock the Rock
    • The Girl Can't Help It >
      • Pt2:The Girl Can't Help It
  • Free State of Jones
  • Great Wall (2017)
  • Rogue One & World War 2
  • Hollywood and anti-Americanism in a small country: Amercan movies & their critics in New Zealand 1916 - 1956
    • New Zealanders' Love of Movies 1900s-1956
    • Campaign against Hollywood movies in New Zealand
    • Campaign against HollywoodPt 2
  • Hollywood versus Pinewood Pt2
  • New Zealanders and Movies: the Enigmatic Gordon Mirams: film critic, film censor and public intellectual
  • Aryan Papers: Stanley Kubrick's Proposed Movie

People in History Who Inspired Movies: Part Two

Adele Bloch-Bauer, Gustav Klimt & Maria Altmann

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The focus of the 2015 movie Woman in Gold is the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt's famous 1907 painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer, one of his patrons, and, along with her husband, who commissioned the portrai,  the leading light of one of Vienna's most famous pre-World War I's salons. After Hitler's take-over of Austria in 1938, the portrait was one of many stolen from the Bloch-Bauer's collection under the Nazi 'Aryanisation' scheme of "confiscating" Jewish art works, property, and businesses. Several decades later the Bloch-Bauer's niece, Maria Altmann, began a legal battle to recovery the family's art works from the Aistrian government.
George Armstrong Custer
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General George Armstrong Custer (center), one of the American West's most controversial figures, has been the subject of several movies. Errol Flynn, above right, in They Died With Their Boots On, portrayed him as a dashing, courageous leader of men and protector of the Indian. But in the,the revisionist Little Big Man, Richard Mulligan's Custer (above left) is a preening,  ambitious, arrogant and eventually crazy murderer of women and children. This 1970 Vietnam Western uses the figure of Custer to explore issues of genocide and racism.
Alan Turing
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Turing as portrayed in "The Imitation Game"
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Sculpture of Turing at BletchleY Park
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Turing in real life.
The enigmatic and controversial Alan Turing, brilliant mathematician and one of the leading code-breakers at Bletchley Park is the subject of the 2014 movie The Imitation Game, where he is portrayed by Brendan Cumberbatch.  The movie, like most accounts of Turing's work at Bletchley Park, gives a misleading impression of Turing's contribution to two of the essential breakthroughs at deciphering the German World War 2 military codes: Enigma and Tunny, and in devising the two machines - the Bombes and Colossus - that effected the decoding. It also falsely claims that Turing's homosexuality enabled him to be blackmailed by a Soviet spy at Bletchley. 
Cumberpatch's intense performance, although most impressive, also gives a misleading impression of Turing's personality. In public he was much more confident and forceful; he travelled widely,was not particularly insensitive or arrogant, was not a loner, and was quite open about his homosexuality.
Reinhold Heydrich
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Heydrich - Hitler called him "the man with the iron heart". He was Himmler's go-to man: "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich".
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Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, the two members of the Czechoslovakian assassination squad who attacked Heydrich with grenade and pistols.
Surprisingly, the dramatic assassination of Reinhold Heydrich and the German hunt for those responsible has been the subject of only a couple of movies. The attack that eventually killed Heydrich in Prague ( Operation Anthropod) and the siege that quickly followed as the Nazi cornered the assassination squad in a cathedral were highly dramatic. However, the ultimate consequences of the German revenge were so horrific that  even after six decades the subject remains by-passed by film-makers.