Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds, lead by Lt. Aldo Raine soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.
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So be warned: This isn't "Schindler's List" (or even a remake of 1978's "The Inglorious Bastards," which provided little more than title inspiration).
The Italian war flick Tarantino stole the title from, Enzo Castellari's 1978 The Inglorious Bastards, gets a passing nod — Tarantino is obviously more enthralled with the Germans, especially Third Reich patriotic war films like the one that's screening at Shoshanna's theater.
(The deliberate misspellings of the title, presumably, are meant to simultaneously pay homage to, and make a crucial distinction from, the 1978 Italian war movie " The Inglorious Bastards.
Despite Pitt's sadism, this "Dirty Dozen" redux -- inspired by Enzo Castellari's 1978 exploitation film "The Inglorious Bastards" -- turns out to be the sketchiest component in an unexpectedly elaborate design dominated by Christoph Waltz's arch villain, Col. Hans Landa.
This is not, as has been reported in some places, a remake of the 1978 feature The Inglorious Bastards, although the title is an homage.
The oddly spelled "Inglourious Basterds" (it's loosely inspired by Enzo Castellari's 1978 action flick "The Inglorious Bastards") stars Brad Pitt, who is positively fantastic.
The Basterds themselves are a movie construct—by way of Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Enzo Castellari’s Italian variant The Inglorious Bastards (1978)—reimagined as vengeance-seeking Jews (led by a bizarre hillbilly-ized Brad Pitt) terrorizing Nazis behind enemy lines.
Guess we should also condemn “The Blues Brothers” for the gratuitous use of “Illinois Nazis,” and of course Indiana Jones, and “The Dirty Dozen,” and…
In an attempt to go "The Dirty Dozen" one dirtier, Tarantino piles on yet another macabre flourish, in the form of a swastika that Raine carves into the foreheads of the Germans he doesn't kill.
(The deliberately misspelled title comes from a spaghetti-Western knockoff of “The Dirty Dozen” that provided very slight inspiration for Tarantino’s movie.)
It is The Dirty Dozen on crystal meth, Defiance without conscience, presented by a cocksure filmmaker for whom no project is "only a movie."
What’s best to remember is that this is Tarantino’s “The Dirty Dozen,” an homage to action films of the bygone era that revels in its brutality and humiliation of the enemy.
Now, when he borrows and name-drops, he often does so with a sense of mischief and fun: Watching “Inglourious Basterds,” longtime movie enthusiasts will be able to spot the visual nods to “The Searchers”; if they’ve seen any ’70s Giallo starring the Algerian-born actress Edwige Fenech, they’ll giggle when they note that the character Mike Myers plays, in a tiny role, is named Gen.
Violence explodes—fabulously, yes, but without trivializing the value of human life—and as a girl escapes into the distance, in a perfect stylistic and thematic homage to The Searchers , a revenge plot is set into stunning motion.
In a farmhouse set-designed to replicate the effect of the cabin in John Ford’s The Searchers , Tarantino stages a patient scene that is Inglourious Basterds at its best.
So be warned: This isn't "Schindler's List" (or even a remake of 1978's "The Inglorious Bastards," which provided little more than title inspiration).
I was reminded of the first time I ever saw Ralph Fiennes, coincidentally also playing a Nazi in Schindler's List.
Inspired by everything from the German cinema of Murnau, Pabst and Josef von Sternberg (Emil Jannings even shows up for the premiere!) to Hogan’s Heroes and (most glaringly) Paul Verhoeven’s fabulous Nazi saga The Black Book, Mr. Tarantino borrows and steals so many clichés from other people’s movies that I’m surprised he didn’t throw in the little girl in the red coat from Schindler’s List.
Who needs bummers like "Schindler's List" and "The Diary of Anne Frank," or even the historically based "Defiance," which featured Jews killing Nazis but was mucked up by all those pesky debates about morality?
Laurent, an unconventional beauty whose performance is aided greatly by the magnificent costume choices by Anna Sheppard (who, not so ironically, has been nominated for Oscars for two other Nazi-themed movies, “Schindler’s List” and “The Pianist’), might disarm Daniel Bruhl’s young war hero with her charm, but this bitch means business when she decides to get her revenge.
Set a melodrama in a concentration camp ( Schindler’s List ), and the result is sentimental kitsch that wins seven Oscars.
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A British spy (Michael Fassbender) is a film critic with an expertise in German cinema and G.W. Pabst; Melanie Laurent plays the proprieter of a cinema in Nazi-occupied France who screens films by Henri-Georges Clouzot for the locals and "The White Hell of Pitz Palu" with Leni Riefenstahl for the occupiers; Emil Jannings (Hilmar Eichhorn) makes a cameo; a guess-the-famous-name card game includes references to Pola Negri, King Kong and Edgar Wallace (the mystery writer whose work inspired an entire genre of postwar German thrillers known as krimi); the first "chapter" of the film is an extended revamp of Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West"; when one of the Basterds disguises himself as an Italian, he is given the name "Antonio Margheriti" -- a reference to the director of such 1960s Italian horror movies as "Castle of Blood."
Its opening—“Once upon a time in Nazi-Occupied France”—sets the tone not just in fairy-tale terms, but in movie fairy-tale terms by invoking Sergio Leone movie titles (Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America).
The sequence strongly alludes to Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (Ennio Morricone's music can't miss).
Ironically, the biggest influence here isn’t a war film, but Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, with its mix of history and fable, and its singular, slow-building scenes (the opening and closing sequences of Basterds are instant classics).
And during the final act of Quentin Tarantino's wildly unpredictable World War II epic, "Inglourious Basterds," you'll hear David Bowie's 1982 theme song to "Cat People."
And any man who can worm in David Bowie’s theme song for the 1982 film “Cat People” into a World War II picture instantly wins my heart.
Inglourious Basterds accomplishes everything it sets out to do and is a welcome addition to the works of Quentin Tarantino, but for those who’ll say that the ending was ridiculously and needlessly violent, I challenge you to show me where it was any more unnecessary or gratuitous than the end of its possible inspiration, Raiders of the Lost Ark (yes, I just compared Tarantino to Steven Spielberg in the Nazi-killing business… you’re welcome).
Just as a holy God wreaked vengeance on the Nazis for violating the sanctity of his Ark of the Covenant with their unmitigated hubris in Raiders of the Lost Ark, so too does Tarantino give us an ending in that same epic vein—full of larger-than-life wrath, a sort of wish fulfillment judgment day.
A British spy (Michael Fassbender) is a film critic with an expertise in German cinema and G.W. Pabst; Melanie Laurent plays the proprieter of a cinema in Nazi-occupied France who screens films by Henri-Georges Clouzot for the locals and "The White Hell of Pitz Palu" with Leni Riefenstahl for the occupiers; Emil Jannings (Hilmar Eichhorn) makes a cameo; a guess-the-famous-name card game includes references to Pola Negri, King Kong and Edgar Wallace (the mystery writer whose work inspired an entire genre of postwar German thrillers known as krimi); the first "chapter" of the film is an extended revamp of Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West"; when one of the Basterds disguises himself as an Italian, he is given the name "Antonio Margheriti" -- a reference to the director of such 1960s Italian horror movies as "Castle of Blood."
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From constant references to Pabst and Riefenstahl to pieces of score from Dimitri Tiomkin ( The Alamo ), Ennio Morricone (multiple Italian scores, The Battle Of Algiers ) and even snatches of music lifted from more recent horror movies like The Entity and Cat People (David Bowie’s song Putting Out Fire ) to hints of every war movie ever made, Tarantino once again insists on wearing his cinephilia on his sleeve.
But, while QT fans are still waiting for a film that doesn’t rely so heavily on past movie references (the score lifts from Kelly’s Heroes, The Entity (!) and Cat People (!!)), this is assembled with too much class to be anything other than a success.
Tarantino's new World War II movie, "Inglourious Basterds," brings with it the usual avalanche of insider film-geek references: A character named Aldo Raine is a reference to the late Aldo Ray, star of the 1955 war movie "Battle Cry"; the name of another character — Hugo Stiglitz — refers to a Mexican horror-film star.
Tarantino visits his storehouse of shallow cleverness by naming Pitt's character Aldo Raines -- an allusion to actor Aldo Ray, who was a solid actor in such films as Battle Cry (1955) and The Naked and the Dead (1958).