Pat Dollard

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“The Basterds, as Pitt’s gang refer to themselves, are introduced like vintage bad-ass cowboys despite the alarmingly incongruous Jewish looks.”

CANNES, France (Reuters) – U.S. director Quentin Tarantino rolls a Western, gangster flick and wartime caper into one in “Inglourious Basterds”, a new film starring Brad Pitt as the leader of a ruthless gang of Nazi-slayers.

So fearsome is the band of Jewish-American “bastards” that Adolf Hitler himself comes to hear of them, and the predictably violent and action-packed narrative weaves real life figures into a riotous and fanciful plot that re-writes history.

Most of the dialogue is in German and French and translated with subtitles, possibly limiting the film’s box office potential in the United States.

But at the Cannes film festival, where Tarantino’s picture is in the main competition and has its world premiere on Wednesday, there was warm applause after a press screening.

“I am not an American film maker, I make movies for the planet Earth and Cannes is the place that represents that,” said the 46-year-old, who won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1994 with “Pulp Fiction”.

“During this time here on the Riviera, cinema matters, it’s important,” he told reporters, explaining why he rushed to have his movie ready in time for the world’s biggest film festival.

Early reviews have been mixed.

Hollywood publication Variety’s Todd McCarthy said the movie improved halfway through, “after which it’s off to the races”, but Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian called it a “catastrophe” and like “some colossal armor-plated turkey from hell.”

Tarantino declined to explain why he inserted spelling mistakes into the title of his film, borrowed from Italian director Enzo Castellari’s 1978 picture “Inglorious Bastards”.

EXPLOSIVE CLIMAX

The narrative opens in the first year of the German occupation of France, where character Shosanna Dreyfus witnesses the execution of her family at the hands of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, flamboyantly played by Christoph Waltz.

Elsewhere in Europe, Pitt’s character Aldo Raine forms a group of soldiers charged with scalping their Nazi victims.

Diane Kruger plays a famous German actress who is also an undercover agent on a mission to take down the leaders of the Third Reich. The strands converge on a small Parisian cinema where history is turned on its head in an explosive climax.

Much of the humor in Inglourious Basterds stems from language. Americans’ reputations for speaking nothing other than English is a recurring theme, with Pitt’s limited Italian comically exposed by the polyglot Landa.

Tarantino said he and Pitt had wanted to work together on a movie for some time.

“Artistically, me and Brad have been sniffing around each other for a while, the longing looks across the room and everything, the little notes: ‘I like you, do you like me?’”

Pitt said he agreed to play Raine after discussing the part with the director long into the night.

“I got up the next morning and I saw five empty bottles of wine laying on the floor … and something that resembled a smoking apparatus, I don’t know what that was about,” Pitt said.

“And apparently I agreed to do the movie because six weeks later I was in uniform and I was Lieutenant Aldo Raine.”

Times Online:

Quentin Tarantino has turned the Festival Palais in Cannes into his very own Cinema Paradiso, daringly celebrating cinema’s ability to rewrite one of the most painful chapters in history. The title of his Second World War fantasy is inspired by Enzo Castellari’s little-watched 1978 film, Inglorious Bastards. The deliberate misspelling of Tarantino’s title is a mystery, but perhaps a tortured reference to the glorious clash of real and fictitious characters in the movie.

Tarantino’s film, which jumps like a needle on a scratchy vinyl record between three languages, bears scant resemblance to Castellari’s Italian original. Here, a small group of blood-thirsty Jewish mercenaries from America, led by Brad Pitt’s red-neck, half-Apache Indian leader, land in France with the mission to put the fear of God into the Nazis. The director deploys his unrivalled army of B-movie tricks to light the way.

The film starts like a spaghetti western and then accelerates into an old-fashioned war-time thriller, complete with a sumptuous plot to blow a local cinema in Paris to smithereens — and with it most of Germany’s top military brass. Bullets and blood are never far from the screen.

The Basterds, as Pitt’s gang refer to themselves, are introduced like vintage bad-ass cowboys despite the alarmingly incongruous Jewish looks. They ambush German patrols in forests, and proceed to scalp them in lurid closeup. Pitt’s leader revels in this comic and macabre campaign, toying with captives before carving swastikas into their foreheads. While German captives gabble for their lives, Pitt’s calm, southern drawl is almost comically ruthless.

The fairytale tone of Tarantino’s picture is strikingly obvious from the opening line: “Once upon a time… in Nazi-occupied France”. The chief villain, a Gestapo officer charged with hunting down Jews, is as familiar and frightening as the Rat Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Chistoph Waltz plays him with a fabulously silky menace, as he sniffs around the Paris cinema in which Joseph Goebbels is about to unveil his new propaganda masterpiece.

On one thrilling level Tarantino paints a surreal revenge fantasy where some of the most toxic villains in history get their grisly dues. The brief glimpse of Hitler with his bullet-ridden face almost perforated beyond recognition made the Cannes audience gasp.

But by measuring his own film against that of Goebbels, the director asks whether pulp is any better than propaganda. In this sense it is Tarantino’s most sophisticated film since part one of Kill Bill.

What’s difficult to square is the occasional Springtime for Hitler scenes, featuring an apoplectic Fuhrer, with the darker corners of the film. The almost casual savagery perpetrated by Pitt and his German rival can occasionally look unnervingly out of place next to the lighter Mel Brooks-style moments. That said, this is a fairytale of unusual and thoughtful daring. A return at last by Tarantino to his combustible and operatic best.

The Guardian:

Like the loyal German bourgeoisie in 1945, trying to keep patriotically cheerful despite the distant ominous rumblings of Russian tanks, we Tarantino fans have kept loyally optimistic on the Croisette this week. We ignored the rumourmongers, the alarmists and defeatists, and insisted that the Master would at the last moment fire a devastating V1 rocket of a movie which would lay waste to his, and our, detractors. But today the full catastrophe of his new film arrived like some colossal armour-plated turkey from hell. The city of our hopes is in flames.

Quentin Tarantino’s cod-WW2 shlocker about a Jewish-American revenge squad intent on killing Nazis in German-occupied France is awful. It is achtung-achtung-ach-mein-Gott atrocious. It isn’t funny; it isn’t exciting; it isn’t a realistic war movie, yet neither is it an entertaining genre spoof or a clever counterfactual wartime yarn. It isn’t emotionally involving or deliciously ironic or a brilliant tissue of trash-pop references. Nothing like that. Brad Pitt gives the worst performance of his life, with a permanent smirk as if he’s had the left side of his jaw injected with cement, and which he must uncomfortably maintain for long scenes on camera without dialogue.

And those all-important movie allusions are entirely without zing, being to stately stuff such as the wartime German UFA studio, GW Pabst etc, for which Tarantino has no feeling, displaying just a solemn Euro-cinephilia that his heart isn’t in. The expression on my face in the auditorium as the lights finally went up was like that of the first-night’s audience at Springtime for Hitler. Except that there is no one from Dusseldorf called Rolf to cheer us up.

Pitt plays Lt Aldo Raine, the leader of an anti-Nazi commando unit whose avowed mission is to get 100 Kraut scalps apiece; we see the scalpings in full, gruesome detail, yet that figure is entirely forgotten about by the end. Mélanie Laurent plays Shosanna Dreyfus, a beautiful young Jewish woman whose family were slaughtered by SS Col Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz. She got away and (somehow) attained not only a new identity, but also ownership of a Paris cinema which is to play host to the premiere of Dr Goebbels’s latest propaganda movie, in the presence of the Führer himself. Her plan is to incinerate the entire first-night audience by bolting the doors and igniting her vast inflammable stock of nitrate film. Meanwhile Lt Raine has his own plans for killing Hitler at the movie theatre and the Brits get involved too, in the form of suave Michael Fassbender as Archie Hicox, a crack commando making contact with exotic spy Bridget von Hammersmark, played by Diane Kruger.

There are some nice-ish performances, particularly from Fassbender and Waltz, but everything is just so boring. I was hoping for Shosanna at least to get a satisfying revenge on the unspeakable Col Landa. But no. The two Hitler-assassination plots cancel each other out dramatically and the director’s moderate reserves of narrative interest are exhausted way before the end. He should perhaps go back to making cheerfully inventive outrageous films like Kill Bill. Because Kill Adolf hasn’t worked out.