The Thief Collector review – the ordinary married couple behind a massive art heist – The Guardian
It was a brazen case of daylight theft. In 1985, a pair walked into an artwork gallery on the campus of the College of Arizona and left quarter-hour later with a rolled-up Willem de Kooning shoved up the person’s jacket. In 2017, the portray was lastly recovered – not by the FBI, however by a trio of home clearance guys in New Mexico. It had been hanging for 30 years on the bed room wall of retired academics Rita and Jerry Alter.
How an abnormal couple just like the Alters pulled off one of many greatest artwork heists of the twentieth century is informed on this largely entertaining documentary. You possibly can think about the story being became a podcast and it’s maybe stretched a bit skinny for a full-length documentary. (Did we actually want an interview with the couple’s nephew’s son?) The weak hyperlink is the movie’s dramatisation of the theft: a tongue-in-cheek pastiche that feels a bit glib as questions concerning the Alters’ motivations deepen and darken. Nonetheless, the movie provides an interesting glimpse into the thriller of different individuals, particularly different individuals’s marriages. Family and friends nonetheless look dazed that the Alters – Rita and Jerry! – had been behind the theft.
The unlikely heroes of the story are a trio of honest-as-they-come home clearance males who purchased the De Kooning together with the contents of Jerry and Rita’s home after they died. When a buyer provided them $200,000 for the portray, they did a little bit of Googling; after realising it might be the lacking art work (Lady-Ochre, now price round $160m), they had been straight on the telephone to the gallery in Arizona to return it, with no query of creating a dime for themselves.
The three males are sensible interviewees, heat and totally respectable; their expertise in rooting via different individuals’s houses and lives has clearly given them the sort of perception that might make them nice detectives, too. And if nothing else, this documentary ought to offer somebody working in tv the thought of creating a detective sequence about home clearance consultants.
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