A characteristically intelligent review from Philip French in
'The Observer', which actually makes me want to see the movie...
Quentin Tarantino's films are celebrations of cinema and, more specifically, of popular genres and he is in love not only with their conventions but with the American language which has been part of their fabric. His new film, Inglourious Basterds, is a homage to the war movie, which became an entertainment genre during the course of the Second World War as a vehicle for allied propaganda, though the war was not, at least directly, a major concern of Goebbels's Nazi cinema.
It continued when peace came, its heyday being the 1950s and 60s, but Tarantino's inspiration was a schlocky Italian exploitation movie, Enzo G Castellari's 1978 Quel maledetto treno blindato (That damned armoured train) that received a limited release in the English-speaking world as The Inglorious Bastards. In Castellari's coarse, clumsily plotted film, a bunch of American misfits on their way to a military prison in France some weeks after D-Day escape from their guards. But they are then drawn into a secret anti-German mission while heading for the Swiss border. Tarantino's plotting is not that much more refined, but his film-making is and he follows the original film in having the Germans, the French and the Americans speak their own languages.
The film unfolds in five chapters and chapter one is as good as anything Tarantino has done and is wonderfully lit by one of America's finest cinematographers, Robert Richardson. The chapter is called "Once Upon a Time in German Occupied France, 1941", its title, mood and Ennio Morricone music evoking the opening sequence of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West.
It's an idyllic day in rural France. A farmer is chopping wood outside his remote farm, a small party of German troops on motorcycles approaches from the distance. Their leader is SS Colonel Landa (a brilliant performance by Christoph Waltz), a suave, charismatic sadist charged with hunting for fugitive Jews. As the camera circles around them, Land interrogates the farmer LaPadite in a wheedling, menacingly playful, manipulative manner. The tension resembles a violin string just before it snaps. Landa has been talking a silkily fluent French, but suddenly suggests they talk in English. Is Tarantino compromising by this language switch? No, it's part of Landa's deadly strategy of getting LaPadite to betray himself. Suddenly violence erupts and the episode, shot in some 25 minutes of real time, ends with a dramatic link that isn't picked up until the third chapter.
This opening is both entertaining and morally serious and one thinks of what Robert Warshow wrote in his great essay The Westerner in 1953. "In war movies, it is possible to present the uses of violence within a framework of responsibility," he remarked, adding: "At its best, the war movie may represent a more civilised point of view than the western, and if it were not continually marred by ideological sentimentality we might hope to find it developing into a higher form of drama."
Ideological sentimentality is not a charge that could be made against Tarantino, but his film thereafter, though consistently gripping, is uneven and fractured as it follows the revenge motif set up in the first chapter. The second chapter, set two years later, introduces us to the eponymous "inglourious basterds", a band of American Jewish soldiers sent to perpetrate anti-Nazi atrocities in occupied France. They've been recruited by a Gentile from the Deep South, Captain Aldo Raine, a name derived from the bull-necked actor Aldo Ray, star of such war films as Battle Cry and The Naked and the Dead. Brad Pitt's Raine's opening address evokes the mission speeches of George Scott's Patton and Lee Marvin's maverick major in The Dirty Dozen, and this unlikely bunch torture their prisoners, beat them to death with baseball bats, scalp them and carve swastikas on their foreheads. They become, as well they might, an irritation to Hitler.
It is true that Hollywood studios were very cagey in the representation of Jews in wartime movies. In 194O, Joseph Kennedy, the isolationist American ambassador to Britain, father of JFK, had advised the Hollywood moguls to "get those Jewish names off the screen" and to "stop making anti-Nazi pictures or using the film medium to promote or show sympathy to the cause of 'democracies' versus 'the dictators'." As late as 1944, Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers, told the producer of Objective Burma!: "I like the idea of a Jewish officer in Burma. See that you get a clean-cut American type for Jacobs." But Tarantino's readjustment is a mindless, puerile gesture, especially viewed in the light of Defiance, Edward Zwick's recent film about Jewish guerrillas in Second World War Byelorussia.
The film's revenge theme takes an extraordinary turn in the later chapters set in 1944 between D-Day and the liberation of Paris, when the Nazis decide to stage the world premiere of a patriotic movie at a French cinema managed by the attractive Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), the sole survivor of a Jewish family. Churchill and a British general (played as a parody of a stereotype by Mike Myers) send a British film critic with special knowledge of German cinema (Michael Fassbender) to collaborate with the Basterds on destroying the Germany high command, Hitler, Goebbels, Bormann and Goering among them, at this premiere, while Shosanna independently plans her own Götterdämmerung.
The result, involving some slack and highly ingenious plotting, features a beautiful German movie star working as a double agent and a German version of Audie Murphy, and invokes The Dirty Dozen, To Be or Not to Be, The Last Metro and a dozen movies set in cinemas. The grand central conceit is that those who worship and glorify movies but are unworthy of them (eg Goebbels) will die in a cinema. The violence will spread from the screen into the auditorium and the fuel to burn them or ignite their pyres will be provided by the inflammable material of film itself. The notion is as intoxicating as it is demented.
And the reception in France & Germany is interesting (from Hollywood Reporter)...
In France, "Basterds" also opened in the top spot with $6.1 million from 500 situations, or 30% of the market, per Universal figures. The first-place Germany intro produced $4.3 million from 443 sites and a 26% market share.
