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Griffith's performance and the real life art forger Elmyr de Hory

posted 19 years ago by jdcopp
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Having just watched Orson Welles' "F is for Fake", I can't help but be impressed by the similarity between the art forger Elmyr de Hory and Hugh Griffith's characterization of an art forger in William Wyler's "How to Steal A Million". Given that the film was shot in the summer of 1965 some four years before Clifford Irving's book on de Hory made him publicly known, does anyone know the extent to which the writers of this film George Bradshaw and Harry Kurnitz, its director William Wyler or the actor Hugh Griffith knew of de Hory and based the fictional art forger Charles Bonnet on de Hory?

[–] SheykAbdullah 19 years ago

I don't think the movie is based on de Hory, de Hory was mostly into forging Matisses and early twentieth century pieces. The forging of recent pieces like that is much easier than what Bonnet does in this movie, for example, things like scrapping dirt off a canvas would not need to be done with a Matisse. An oil painting can actually take up to a century to fully dry, so many of the stuff de Hoory forged isn;t even dried yet, compared to a Van Gigh or Cezanne which is fully dried and beginning to crack. More than likely the techniques Bonnet uses was drawn from the revelations brought out during the trials of van Meegeren in the '40's. In fact, Meegeren is actually mentioned in the movie.

Jeff