INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS: TARANTINO’S WORLD WAR II CAPER A DECADE ON

When Quentin Tarantino screened his widely anticipated WWII movie Inglourious Basterds at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, critics were divided and mostly perplexed. When the film opened wide in August that same year the reviews were mostly still mixed by the same critics and yet this was the writer/director’s biggest box office hit to date and a firm fan favourite almost immediately. As time has gone on and the ten year anniversary of its general release is upon us, I look back at the lasting appeal of the film and how it has endured despite its subversive, outrageous, and uncommercial sensibilities. 

The film tells the story of two seperate plans to assassinate members of the Nazi high command at a Nazi Propaganda film premiere during occupied France in 1944. It charts the personal quest for vengeance of a young Jewish woman, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), who in the film’s 1941 setup, is the sole survivor of her family’s execution by Col Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Elsewhere in France during this time, America has joined the war and we follow a Jewish military unit (The Basterds) led by Lt Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) behind enemy lines as their shocking fear tactics that make waves felt as far up as Hitler himself. As the film dovetails and hurtles towards its explosive finale, fates converge and history is altered forever under the roof of a cinema, the only place where anything can happen. 

The film is mostly remembered now by the extraordinary performance of Austrian actor Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa; an SS Officer who is the film’s main villainous drive. Waltz, a virtual unknown at the time of casting famously said to his director, “Thank you for giving me my career”, to which Tarantino responded, “Thank you, for giving me my movie”.

It’s true that production on Basterds was only a week from being shut down during casting; it appeared Tarantino had written a character so devilishly talented in linguistics that it was impossible to find an actor who could both speak four languages and deliver everything else the script demanded. Thankfully fate intervened and careers were revived on both sides of the camera. Landa is arguably the greatest character of Tarantino’s career, from a body of work that has boasted many memorable characters. But although it’s the villainous Landa who remains the main pop-culture touchstone of the piece and the pinnacle of Tarantino’s career, the film boasts many delights.

Like the heist film without a heist that was Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino’s long awaited ‘men-on-a-mission’ WWII actioner that had been talked up since 1998 was devoid of notable warfare. The film still functioned somewhat as a men-on-a-mission style caper but was also a Spaghetti Western-style revenge story, a spy thriller, an examination of Nazi Propaganda, as well as a love letter to cinema itself.

From the moments that Nick Perito's rendition of ‘The Green Leaves of Summer’ accompanies the opening credits.

To the beautiful fairytale like vistas of the opening shot.





To the broken tranquility when Ennio Morricone’s music introduces the approaching doom.





It’s clear that Tarantino is in pure command of melding all these scattered elements into something special.

The opening chapter ‘Once Upon a Time...in Nazi-occupied France’ opens to ideallic greener-than-green vistas of French cow-country and the film sets the expectation of a fairytale that encourages us to leave grounded reality at the door. ‘The Green Leaves of Summer’ was most famously used to open The Alamo (1960) a John Wayne western that famously took historical liberties with the 1836 account of outnumbered American’s defending against thousands of Mexican aggressors. This ties into the later pivotal war story of Frederich Zoller as well as the film’s later history bending directions. When Ennio Morricone’s ‘La Condanna’ (from 1966 Spaghetti Western The Big Gundown) enters to warn of approaching evil, it seamlessly merges, with Morricone’s sampling of Beethoven’s ‘Fur Elise’, both Western and German insignias.





“Landa is the best character I’ve written and maybe the best I ever will write” - Quentin Tarantino

It’s a masterclass of a scene. Tarantino’s penchant for dialogue is too often the forefront of any conversation and yet his mastery of silences and expressions are seldom the focus; The look on the farmer’s face as the Nazi vehicles approach, the look between his daughters’s before they’re asked to leave the farmhouse. The scene is a mystery to anyone watching for the first time, it’s a polite enough exchange between two strangers and yet the atmosphere is the feeling of someone’s worst nightmare, of that day they feared could come. The niceties slip soon enough as Landa enters into a monologue explaining why Jews are despised such as rats are, a preposterous point so levelled in its delivery that the delusional ideology sounds madly reasonable and evident why it could be used to justify a hateful doctrine. Of the film’s 153 minute runtime the opening segment is an excruciating twenty-one minutes and serves as a nerve shredding intro to the story’s main villain (Landa) and protagonist (Shosanna). It’s the first of multiple nail-biting set-pieces and interrogations used to introduce and reveal characters, building to the final chapter under Shosanna’s Parisian Cinema.

At the heart of Basterds is a Nazi Propaganda film - Nations Pride - directed by the real-life Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebells about the exploits of fictional war hero Frederich Zoller. It’s an onslaught of a film that shows hundreds of American soldiers maimed by a single Nazi sniper. The theatre full of the Nazi Party is electrified, Hitler himself is in fits of joyful bloodlust, and then the tables are turned as hundreds of Nazis are gunned down and burnt to death in the climax. The bloodlust is now on us as we enjoy the carnage, the violent catharsis of it all, the escapist ecstasy of a more satisfying end to the war. The fantasy of revenge is as much a fantasy as living in a world where violence doesn’t provide solutions and the meta-effect of the film speaks to the viewer and asks, ‘it feels good doesn’t it?’ The narrative of Inglourious Basterds itself is a propaganda film, how Tarantino showcases Lt Aldo Raine’s exploits are no different from how Goebells showcases Zoller’s. It's not even a far push to assume upon returning to America that Aldo would be greeted with a post-war career similar to that of Frederich Zoller and do wonders for US Military recruitment and morale. A Russian doll effect even takes shape when considering that Shosanna hijacks Goebell’s film and inserts her own message, making Inglourious Basterds a Jewish propaganda film inside a Nazi propaganda film inside an American propaganda film.


“It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you're on.” - Alfred Hitchcock


It's clear how the film takes a levelled look at the Nazi soldiers throughout; it has fun making them look, obvious absurd racial beliefs included, pompous and egotistical but never less than deadly. Frederich Zoller would be easy to depict as a tunnel visioned political social climber who boasts of his kill count that’s hooked the attention of Goebells, yet he’s painted as a love sick puppy dog barking up the wrong tree during his pursuit of Shosanna. He’s even introduced as a budding cinephile to Shosanna, who could not be less interested in a man in a Nazi uniform, a factor he pig-headidly fails to comprehend and one that ends up being both their undoings. The narrative almost entirely rests on this monstrous oversight of hubris. Zoller is killed by Shosanna because his affection for her blinded him from the questionable moral weight of his uniform. Shosanna is killed by Zoller because for a single moment she pities him and for the first time sees a man through his uniform. While the film does a great job of providing cathartic turns showing totalitarian extremist figures as jokes (this is sometimes the only way to wound Evil) it acknowledges the danger of losing sight, even for a second the severity of their threat. If it weren't for his uniform the audience would be cheering Frederich to 'get-the-girl' like any other cinematic romance!

Whereas Inglourious Basterd’s opening chapter went down as a notable masterclass even by the film’s own detractors, it as a whole divided critics. Upon release the film was often maligned for being a retread of Tarantino’s previous two ‘lighter’ releases (Kill Bill and Death Proof), this time using the WWII backdrop as a poor excuse to inflict a third dose of violent retribution. The verdict was out if whether Basterds as a return to form but even the more favorable critics often summed it up as a revenge fantasy narrative. Looking at the film this simply is to undermine the way it explores other complex themes.

With Tarantino’s subsequent films - Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight - we can see Basterds clearer than we could ten years ago. The preoccupations of his racially charged westerns are built upon the foundations set here as they explore our relationship with history through genre-cinema, the necessity of violence, and how certain types of violence find their place on and off of the screen.

Django Unchained followed a freed slave on the path to retrieving his wife from her cruel plantation owner. The film offers many pleasures in seeing the downtrodden rise up but Django’s nobel quest for his wife was only possible if he became more dangerous and single minded than the white captors. White blood will spill and if black blood has to as well then so be it, as he is owed what is his. It’s a cinematic fantasy, like Basterds, in that the world can be made right by an individual (or individuals) who enforce their right more heavily than those enforcing against them.

The Hateful Eight, Tarantino’s second western, explores the issue of systematic justice verses vigilantism explored in his first.


“The man who pulls the lever that breaks your neck will be a dispassionate man. And that dispassion is the very essence of justice. For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice" - Oswaldo Mobray (The Hateful Eight)


The fact that the above quote is delivered by character Oswaldo Mobray, an outlaw posing as a court official, doesn’t make it any less true. The world is built up of intricate laws and systems that allowed the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust, the same can be said of slavery and of most injustice still felt today. Inglourious Basterds is revelling in the power of cinema here, of noting the power of the image as propaganda but also of its power to give us the feeling of balance that real life so rarely gives us. In reality the system fails us, the wrong person goes to prison, the guilty enjoy freedom, the rich make bail, Hitler doesn’t face tribunal but takes his own life. Cinema has the power to provide a feeling of closure, no matter how ethereal.

Released within the same decade as 9/11, Basterds naturally attracted comparisons to ongoing current events with a central plot involving US Soldiers undergoing a suicide bombing mission. The Iraq war was still ongoing along with critical humanitarian debates regarding torture as a tool to prevent greater threat to life. Here we're presented with a garish depiction of American warfare, one which uses sheer brutality to extract information. American suicide bombers isn’t the only way the film plays it on the other foot, either; In fact if the above is pure coincidence then there are other examples where Basterds used a European mirror to reflect US history. The fact that Hitler is killed in a theatre box by surprise gunfire reminds of President Lincoln’s Assassination by the hands of John Wilkes Booth in 1865. Then there’s the obvious subtextual reading of King Kong (1933) by Major Hellstrom during the film's now infamous 'La Louisiana Tavern' sequence in which the SS Major smuggly acknowledges the film's story as a metaphor for the enslavement of Africans in America. A sly reference that remind the viewer that no matter how much mileage the Nazis have given cinema for villany, that America pre-dated the Jewish Holocaust with not only one but two of their own if you also add in the genocide of Native Americans. Tarantino even applies the classic stereotypically racist southern-hillbilly profile to Pitt’s Lt Aldo Raine, turning the idea on its head as Raine, unnerving as he is, hates what the Nazi Party believe in and is proud to fight them.

When I first saw Inglourious Basterds it was clear that Tarantino was operating on a new level and this was also the summation of everything made before it. It was razor sharp, focussed, and confident in a way that surpassed his other films; a stranglehold with moments of ecstatic delight. I was reminded that this was a 'come back' vehicle and yet it's remarkable only a third is spoken in English, Brad Pitt its only notable star and is essentially a supporting role, and it references European history and pre-war cinema without ego or condescension. Of its 153minutes the plot only emerges somewhat over an hour in and its action (finale not including) is sparse. What other director could or would make their biggest commercial hit out of such material? This was anarchic filmmaking reminding that there are rules to cinema that are optional to follow and yet the ghosts of cinema's forefathers such as Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubtich, and Alfred Hitchcock, among others, are felt in every frame reminding of cinema's oldest tricks and formalities. How Tarantino juggles the artificial pleasures of cinema while maintaining high drama will always, for me, be his greatest skill.

Viewed today in preparation to write this piece, the film seems more important and impressive than ever. In the last four years the World has become more extreme and yet never so muddied as Presidents are replaced by reality stars, celebrities are replaced by influencers, and as the screens of our attention are getting smaller and smaller the more we're being controlled by them. In a time where everyone is plugged into their own private reality that can be controlled by totalitarian extremists, with its own version of historic events and focus on wartime propaganda, Inglourious Basterds appears all the more prescient when viewed during the ‘fake news’ of today.

Much emphasis has been put on the film's escapist fantasy fulfilment. Today the film's fantasy seems more important and relevant than ever; A victory for the film and a sad fact for Planet Earth. Unlike the survivors of one of Lt Aldo Raine's ambushes, those who seek to oppress and control the masses bare no discernible mark to warn of, don't wear a uniform to speak of, and like history has taught us, hide in plain sight until it's too late. To wish life was that easy truly is a fantasy.

Django Unchained (2012, Quentin Tarantino)

Some old problems still remain in the creaky cinematic machine that is Quentin Tarantino, but his first full foray into the Western genre after years of pseudo efforts has produced his most rewarding and focussed film in 15years.

Following the titular character; a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) is liberated at the hands of a German dentist turned bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz). We follow the duo as they bond in a partnership to at first take down a trio of slaving brothers before moving on to save Django's wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who still remains captive in the dark heart of Mississippi.

Foxx is largely reticent for the most part, a brooding presence with a singular motive to track down his beloved wife but lacking the wit and wherewithal to do so successfully. Waltz's Dr. King Schultz plays on the chemistry from his Oscar-winning turn in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds; a diplomatic exterior acting as smokescreen to latent violence. Though his performance here is much more complex as an acting hero of sorts but also a stranger in a strange land where slavery and the sadistic mistreatment of African slaves is habitual. It's hard to decipher how much Schultz understands of his surroundings at first as his insubordination borders on the naive at times. For instance, when he takes Django for a drink in a local saloon to explain how Django can help him track the Brittle brothers, the owner tells him Django isn't welcome to which Schultz forces him to fetch the Sheriff leading to a standoff. This seeming act of defiance gives way to a secondary motive later on but whether Shultz wholeheartedly understands the deep-set racism at this point is doubtful as his further journey south sees the calm killer become mentally dishevelled by the horrors witnessed.

The first hour sees Django learning new skills and the ways of bounty hunting, earning the money that will make his mission to Mississippi possible. A 'buddy movie' scenario arises as the two form a deadly team while Schulz becomes increasingly attached to the man whose freedom he now feels responsible for. The doctor forms a rather complex plan for a facade in which the two pose as Mandingo traders - the profession of slave fighting -  in a bid to get the "attention" of Broomhilda's wealthy plantation owner Calvin Candie played by Leonardo DiCaprio. It's upon their arrival in Candie's county and eventually his household that the film descends into a nightmare game of wits and a further exploration into the echelons of human depravation.

Django Unchained features some of the most fluid directing of recent Tarantino; whereas his Inglourious Basterds had moments of brilliance it also felt flat and smothered, the pieces didn't slot together, failing to ignite the spark. Save a few misjudged moments the pieces do indeed meld together this time, most notably the flashbacks and musical cues while the gimmicky and stifling nature of Tarantino's chapter format is gladly absent. Director of Photography Robert Richardson also executes some of his best work here which is stunning throughout every frame, delivering images and sequences that stick vividly in the mind. Tarantino has been guilty of overloading his films of late, something that's bewildering to me as he's in such a comfortable financial standpoint but has constructed his films like each could be his last, offering an extraneous amount of ideas and characters thus losing sight as his stories 'develop'. It's refreshing then to have a real journey on our hands this time, yes there are many popups from new and old talents; Jonah Hill has his moment as an early clansman while veteran Don Johnson has fun with his sickly slave owner role. Though as we meet our titular hero in the opening credit sequence who in turn meets with his future partner shortly after, we stick to both Django and Shultz throughout and the men at the end of the film are far from the men who were destined to meet in the beginning.

Leonardo DiCaprio delivers a devilish performance as Calvin Candie, the proprietor of the ill-named 'Candieland'. His role is far from the overbearing evil that could so easily be imagined; Candie is a  spoilt young man of privilege, a product of his wealth and upbringing. He is king in his own castle in a country that condones his barbaric treaty, this is a world where flesh is property. Tarantino takes things into even murkier territory with the arrival of House Master and right hand man Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson at the height of his talents. Possibly the most heinous role a black actor could embark on, Stephen isn't just loyal to his master but is an extension of his mentality. Jackson has perhaps never been this impressive in a performance that like the film itself is fearless in its representation of slavery at this time.

A filmmaker as brash as Tarantino, an artist whose broad strokes are unrivalled in Hollywood was a worry to take on such delicate material as this. Django Unchained has all the hallmarks of his films; the blood-soaked shootouts, visual elements of 70s exploitation cinema, and a warped sense of humour. But for a stubbornly idiosyncratic director it's a marvel that all the elements are juggled so well. Scenes such as slaves being forced to fight to the death, being whipped, branded, set upon by dogs, are all profoundly moving and never short of respectful due to the emotional weight behind it. Then of course there's the comedy of it which stems mostly from character, Stephen's introduction is hilarious despite its damning nature, and the camaraderie between Shultz and Django is often eye watering. The film offers a wide spectrum of emotion and is in some respects exhausting, it's the longest of Tarantino's career and the first without his longtime editor Sally Menke, yet despite its great length (165mins) and the fact that Tarantino over ices his cake (once again) this still marks the most focussed of his recent efforts. Just when the film slumps into a lower gear and its forceful drive lessens into ambivalence it always manages to fling back with a powerful punch.

Tarantino's cinema has been increasingly criticised for gross indulgence, superfluousness, and in the recent case of his historic revisions, severe cases of levity. These things can certainly be thrown at Django Unchained but it's passionate and sincere despite it's creator's gung-ho, punk rock approach. I'm baffled by other critics' dismissal of Tarantino in a time of creative drought, as despite his squandering of his talents and various shortcomings here we have a fearless director who for better or for worse will not, cannot compromise. His approach to filmmaking reminds of a quote from the great Billy Wilder, in which he said "If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously". 

With his last film he took on history by way of World War Two and delivered a film with a singular crime of staleness. With Django Unchained, a clear companion piece if there ever was one, Tarantino was always going to ruffle some feathers but here he succeeds in all the ways his previous film failed by being both emotionally engaging and entertaining. They don't make 'em like they used to, but then again they never made 'em like this either.

Carnage (Roman Polanski, 2012)

The king of claustrophobia Roman Polanski is back as he plunges us into the middle of a class war between two sets of parents brought together through a school yard brawl. Yasmina Reza's adapted play (Originally titled Gods of Carnage) breaks down the social constructs, cliches, and lies that all too often form our perception of what adult life should be. It succeeds on this level but feels like it should have more weight, somethings lacking, it needs more bite.

In a breezy upbeat title sequence the credits are displayed over a gang of kids in a New York playground. When the titles cease, one boy armed with a stick strikes another boy in the face dropping him to the ground. Cut to the next scene and we're in the home of Michael and Penelope Longstreet (John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster), it was their boy who was attacked and so they've invited the attacking boy's parents round to discuss the matter like adults should. Alan and Nancy Cowan are played by Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet, Alan is an attorney defending an unfortunate drug and Nancy is a stock broker whereas Penelope is a writer on African culture and Michael a hardware salesman. Is any of this information important? It probably shouldn't be but we'll let the four of them decide that.

Once we're dropped into the Longstreet residence it soon becomes clear that we're not going to leave for some time. What follows is an unsettling 80minutes of increasing pandemonium and tension that the infamous director of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby has no problem in creating. Alan and Nancy make it into the outside hallway several times but always seem destined for them to re-enter the apartment of a couple they've just met and frankly don't like. The film's satiric themes and claustrophobic setting strikes a huge comparison with Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962), a film that viciously (in typical Bunuelian cynicism) takes apart the facade of high social standing among the bourgeois and the Catholic church by forcing them to stay in the same room, no one knows why but they just can't leave, thus after some time we see them for what they really are - immoral selfish animals no different from the rest.

What at first starts out as a conversation of manners and hidden digs soon evolves into something more honest and unashamedly offensive. By the end we see them drunk (thanks to the introduction of Michael's 18 year old Scotch), very unhappy, and acting like petulant infants criticising each other's line of work, taking the moral high-ground over each other wherever possible, and vomiting over priceless pieces of literature.

The script is tight, the pacing is brisk and to the point. Christoph Waltz makes the film with his unapologetic smugness and his constant interrupting of matters due to his work phone, John C. Reilly is a pleasure to watch as usual and his trademark man-child like persona is suitably fitting here. In one of the revealing moments his character shouts that Penelope had dressed him up as a Republican just for their meeting when he's really a "short tempered son of a bitch" and goes straight to the drinks cabinet. Kate Winslet is by no means unimpressive here but given her stellar career thus far it can't be helped but feel role of Nancy is slightly below her, and Jodie Foster despite starting well does grate slightly when the overacting kicks in.

Carnage never hits the heights it could have, never leaving a level of comfort that would make for a more thrilling 80minutes thus losing its teeth much like the Longstreet's son. It plays well and is very entertaining with some interesting insights but it never gets lost down in the murkiness of its subject matter, we're left wanting more carnage than what's on offer.

Unlike the great Bunuel, Carnage doesn't leave a bad taste in the mouth afterwards because it just isn't spiteful or revealing enough. Michael, Penelope, Alan, and Nancy seem destined to fight it out even though they really could leave at any time, perhaps their reason for not doing so stems back to the film's simple message - that we are all children; we never really grow up and mature we simply just become more complicated and disillusioned. The final shot shows the boys making it up and playing together in the end, oh how simple it once was to be a child. Children can be unkind, they can be cruel, but they have an honesty that gets lost as age sets in. We see four adults attempting to 'do the right thing' but as the final image reveals, perhaps their children did a better job without the hassle. A simple sorry was all it took and if this is the case then the film begs the question - why do us adults make everything so tragically complicated?

For fans of:

Rope (1948), The Exterminating Angel (1962), The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie (1972)