flickering acetylene lamps," Kirstein wrote later. "Calm and beautiful, the altarpiece was, quite simply, there."

Kirstein and Posey were two members of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the Allies, a small corps of mostly middle-aged men and a few women who interrupted careers as historians, architects, museum curators and professors to mitigate combat damage. They found and recovered countless artworks stolen by the Nazis.

Unidentified G.I. holding a painting of the Madonna and Child, at Altaussee, Austria, 1945. Annotations by Lt. Cdr. Thomas Carr Howe on the verso of the photograph: "Altaussee, Summer 1945. A G.I. holding a Sch. of Leonardo da Vinci [Madonna and Child] taken  to Görings fury  from Monte Cassino. He rejected this painting and many others when they were presented toin fact, did a few term papers on plundered WWII art in college.

I think the movie was somewhere in the "decent to good," range, but a little better screenwriting could have taken it to the, "very good to excellent" range.

In spite of the liberal assemblage in the cast, I think there was an almost unwitting theme of the value and worth of preserving the signs and symbols of western civilization. I was quite surprised to see Catholic priests presented in a somewhat heroic light and the Soviets in a less than flattering one.

As an aside, this month marks the 45th anniversary of the original broadcast of Sir Kenneth Clark's Civilisation series which first aired on the BBC from February - May 1969.

Clark was appointed director of the British