Roth (left) and Pitt in "Inglourious Basterds." (Weinstein Company)

Inglourious Basterds

All right, raise your hand if you really hate Nazis? I mean, really hate ’em! Yeah, me too! Let’s go!

There’s a funky energy to Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited Inglourious Basterds, a film which has already drawn expected comparisons to old-school war movies, to 1960s Italian cinema, and especially to Tarantino’s own slim-but-growing resume, a collection which once seemed rooted in an obsession with crime stories but has morphed into a love affair with genre, period: Kung Fu, blaxploitation, muscle car flicks – if it’s fast, cheap and out of control, Quentin’s ready to give it a close-up. Why wouldn’t he eventually look at World War II movies, a tired but once-vital genre in which storytellers would routinely do a little two-step with the history books in order to spin tales that were close enough to fact but still inventive enough to keep us entertained? 

Maybe it’s just me, though, but there seems to be a secret ingredient hidden in the Basterds mix: Beneath the Nazi-fighting and the double agents and the graphic violence, I noticed an aftertaste of ... the “let’s put on a show” 1930s/1940s musicals of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Think about it – the breathless enthusiasm, the weirdly upbeat can-do spirit, the vintage pluck. The time period even fits. Sure it’s a movie about killin’ Nazis – the more, the better – but deep down Tarantino has saved a little room for an ear-to-ear grinning salute to the audacity of the common man. 

For his sixth film (both parts of Kill Bill are now best considered a single whole), Tarantino has indeed cornered the audacity market. Whereas most WWII movies would rarely poke their heads too far out of the foxhole of historical accuracy, Basterds imagines a different path for the war: We still won, sure, but due in no small part to the efforts of a tight-knit band of Jewish-American commandos charged by their leader, Tennessee gentile hillbilly Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), to go behind enemy lines and deliver to him the scalps – yes, the scalps – of 100 filthy, stinkin’ Nazis per soldier. Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s kill the Nazi high command, too, including Hitler himself. I mean, we’re there already; why waste the trip?

No fear is shown in this movie – at least, not by the good guys. When a small group of the Basterds (as they’re known throughout Nazi-occupied Europe) are caught by a Gestapo officer while rendezvousing with double-agent Bridget von Hammersmark (Troy’s Diane Kruger, finally putting her German heritage to good use), it doesn’t matter that they’re in the basement of an after-hours Parisian café surrounded by carousing German soldiers, or that the officer has a Walther under the table, pointed at the groin of one of the men. The jig is up, but the show must go on. Viva le resistance.

Inglourious Basterds is suffused with Tarantino’s trademark fearless blood-and-guts: when Basterd The Bear Jew (Eli Roth) whips out a baseball bat to dispatch a Nazi, be advised that cutting away from the pulpy violence is not in the director’s nature. Similarly, there’s more scalping shown here than in Dances With Wolves and Nurse Betty combined. But Tarantino loves all movies, and over the five chapters of this long and winding tale he finds time to explore his inner sensualist – witness all the scenes of a shell-shocked Parisian (Mélanie Laurent) in her immaculate movie house – and even to sit and listen to characters talk. The patient opening chapter deals with the genius Nazi Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, a guaranteed Oscar contender) entering a simple French farmhouse and quietly, almost delicately, interviewing the owner about the possibility that he might be hiding some Jewish refugees under the floorboards. Landa keeps popping up throughout the film, but Waltz never gives in to mustache-twirling stereotypes: He’s the bad guy in a movie full of them (up to and including Hitler himself, who here is portrayed more as an evil figurehead), and it’s great fun to watch him deduce, charm and threaten his way to an audience with the Basterds themselves.

Pitt is the other guy to watch here, with his jaw set at an absurdly cartoonish heroic angle: He reminded me of a Milt Caniff character from the Sunday strips of long ago. If Landa gets by on his brains and a mastery of four languages, Lt. Aldo Raine subsists on a set of brass balls and good-natured American cocky righteousness. (He certainly isn’t a linguist: You’ll have to wait for the movie’s biggest laugh – Raine posing as an Tennessee-accented Italian – but it’s worth it.) In the spirit of all Tarantino movies, Raine’s bloodthirsty tendencies and Landa’s consummate evil don’t prevent us from warming to these bastards – just as the historical revisionism and not-for-all-ages gratuitous gore aren’t enough to mask the brilliance of Inglourious Basterds. On any continent, any era and any genre, it remains great fun to watch Tarantino put on a show. 9

Erich Van Dussen is managing editor of Rochester Film Journal. Contact him at info@rochesterfilm.com.