Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is a biographical drama from 2015, ""Woman in Gold"."

It was directed by Simon Curtis from a script by Alexi K. Campbell.

"Woman in Gold" stars Dame Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds, with Daniel Bruhl, Katie Holmes, and Tatiana Maslany.

The film is the story of Maria Altmann.

A story that has also been featured in three documentary films made in 2006, 2007, and 2008.

"Woman in Gold" begins in Los Angeles in the late nineties.

Octogenarian, Maria Altmann, discovers in her late sister's papers, correspondence from the 1940s concerning the sister's attempts to recover artwork stolen from the family by the Nazis.

Through a series of flashbacks, we learned about Maria's early life in Vienna as a daughter of the distinguished Bloch-Bauer family, who are wealthy Jewish patrons of the arts.

Among their possessions was a gilded portrait of Maria's aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, by Gustav Klimt the Austrian symbolist painter.

After the Anschluss, when Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany in 1938, the Bloch-Bauers, like other Jews, we're stripped of their artwork, including six paintings by Klimt.

Maria gets in touch with a fellow Austrian refugee's son, Randy Schoenberg, a lawyer with limited experience.

Maria persuades him to help her reclaim her family's possessions by making a case with the art restitution board in Austria.

Despite her vow never to return to Austria, Maria travels there with Randy to put their case before the board, but the gilded portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, now known as "Woman in Gold," has become part of Austrian national identity.

Austrian officials are determined that it will never leave the country nor its place in the Austrian State Gallery, the Belvedere.

Maria and Randy receive help from Hubertus Czernin, an Austrian investigative journalist who has discovered that the paintings were never legally willed to the Belvedere as the Austrian government has claimed.

But pursuing the case in Austrian courts would be prohibitively expensive.

Randy has an idea of how they might instead pursue their case against the Austrian government in American courts.

That course of action will try both Randy's skills as an attorney and Maria's determination against all odds to regain her family's stolen artworks, including the portrait of her aunt Adele, the "Woman in Gold."

Gustav Klimt's "Woman in Gold," properly known as "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," was a product of the artist's so-called "golden phase".

At the beginning of his career, Klimt painted architectural decorations, but since he wanted to challenge what he called "the hypocritical boundaries of respectability set by Viennese society," much of his work was frankly erotic.

Towards the turn of the 20th century, he ceased accepting public commissions and became instead the preferred portrait painter of the wives of the largely Jewish-Viennese upper classes.

Klimt had used gold leaf in some of his architectural decorations and this carried over into his private commissions.

Of these, the most famous are "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" in 1907 and "The Kiss" in 1907, 1908, for which Adele appears to have been a model as well.

Klimt's use of gold leaf was inspired in part by icons of the sort revered in the Eastern Orthodox Church, but a more direct influence was the Byzantine gold ground mosaics in Ravenna in Italy of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian the First and his wife Theodora.

Mosaics Klimt said were a "revelation" to him.

Klimt's preparations for the portrait of Adele involved over a hundred preparatory sketches.

Used both gold and silver leaf on the painting as well as decorative motifs in guessso to give the painting greater texture.

The portions of the portrait and oil showing Adele's face, neck, and hands make up only one twelfth of the painting.

Art critic, Edward Potzl, at the time describe the work as "more brass than Bloch."

But it later can be widely regarded as one of Klimt's most masterful and beautiful paintings.

The plunder of artworks and other items by the Nazis was neither random nor entirely motivated by greed.

It was instead an organized process of looting the other European countries that fell under German domination during the third Reich led by agents working at the behest of the Nazi party.

The plundering began in 1933 and extended through the end of the Second World War.

Military units known as the Kunstschutz, German for "art protection," seized artwork supposedly to protect them during the war with the declared intention of returning them to the owners after hostility ceased.

In reality, much of the art, especially works of the old masters, became the personal property of Nazi officials.

Other works were given to German or Austrian museums.

Many others simply disappeared.

The looting of Jewish property in particular, was a key part of the strategy of elimination behind the Holocaust.

Jews throughout the occupied territories were not only systematically stripped of their works of art, gold and silver jewelry, ceramics, and other valuables.

The Nazis also seized Jewish books in Hebrew and Yiddish and confiscated Jewish religious items and artifacts.

The books in their hundreds of thousands were shipped to Germany where they were to be destroyed.

The idea behind this effort was the total eradication of Jewish culture, piece by piece, and parallel to the deliberate elimination of the Jews as a people.

The looting of the cultural heritage of a defeated people is a common practice going back to ancient times.

Napoleon's Army's confiscated artworks and precious objects throughout Europe from the Italian peninsula to Spain and Portugal to the Netherlands, to Central Europe for nearly 20 years.

But the Nazi plunderings were unparalleled.

The United States government has estimated the German forces and other Nazi agents looted or forced the sale of one fifth of all Western art then in existence, about a quarter of a million works of art, the greatest displacement of art in human history.

To this day, over 100,000 items have still not been returned to their rightful owners.

Since "Woman in Gold" is an historical as well as a biographical drama, viewers might reasonably wonder how much of what they saw in the film is historically accurate.

Despite the film's depiction of Maria Altmann's tearful farewell to her ailing father, for example, she in fact remained in Vienna despite the danger until after his death in July 1938.

There were also details the film omitted.

Before their escape, Maria's husband, Fritz, was arrested by the Nazis and held at the concentration camp at Dachau for almost two months.

They wanted to pressure Fritz's brother, Bernhard, into transferring ownership of his company to the Nazis.

After Fritz was released, he was under house arrest for another three months before he and Maria escaped Austria.

A writer for the Austrian Daily, "Der Standard", notes that it was actually journalist Hubertus Czernin, not Randy Schoenberg, who researched and initiated Maria Altman's case for restitution.

In the film, it is suggested that Czernin was motivated in his work by his own father's membership in the Nazi party.

But Czernin was unaware of that until 2006, long after he had begun his work as an investigative journalist.

Czernin's father was also imprisoned by the Nazis late in the war for high treason.

And if anybody cares, the convoluted question Chief Justice Rehnquist asks Randy Schoenberg while he makes his case before the Supreme Court was actually asked by Justice David Souter.

But it is true that neither Schoenberg nor Sudor nor any of the other justices could understand the question.

The film includes scenes of Maria Altmann working in her clothing boutique in Los Angeles.

After the war, her brother-in-law established a textile factory in Liverpool.

One of the products he produced there was cashmere, the soft wool made from goat hair.

He sent Maria cashmere's sweater to see whether American buyers might be interested in it.

Maria took the sweater to a department store in Beverly Hills and took an order from them.

Other stores began ordering the sweaters as well and Maria was able to start her own clothing business.

After the settlement of her suit against the Austrian government and the return and sale of her family artworks, she gave the money to family members and many charities, including the Los Angeles Opera.

She continued to live in the same house and work in her shop until her death in 2011 at the age of 94.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Good night.