INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS 2009

Quentin Tarantino takes on the Nazis Ñ and wins

IT’S EASY TO forget in the afterglow of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood that Quentin Tarantino has previously drunk from the well of Sergio Leone film titles. Inglourious Basterds opens with a chapter called ‘Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied France’. And like OUATIH, Basterds courses with the belief that the movies can do anything, be it kill Hitler or save Sharon Tate. Yet here, the men-past-their-prime sadness is replaced with a joy in subverting historical fidelity and war-movie conventions. All in all, Tarantino’s seventh film might well be his most fun.

The plot — Brad Pitt’s ruthless squad of Jewish US soldiers plan to assassinate the Führer at a movie premiere — eschews men-on-a-mission high jinks for trademark Tarantino stylings. Rather than action, it sets its stall out in the unforgettable opening scene, a lengthy discussion between Christoph Waltz’s indelible ‘Jew Hunter’ Hans Landa, a calm, chilling loquacious Nazi, and a dairy farmer (Denis Ménochet) that ratchets up the tension with dialogue and pauses the way other combat films use landmines and barbed wire. In a film named after soldiers who batter the enemy with baseball bats, its most courageous characters are two women: Diane Kruger’s fantastically named Bridget Von Hammersmark, an actor operating undercover for the Allies, and Mélanie Laurent’s Shosanna Dreyfus, who escapes the dairy-farm massacre and, becoming a projectionist, plots to kill the Nazi High Command by locking them in a cinema and setting fire to highly flammable 35mm nitrate film. As in OUATIH, movies save the day.

As such, Inglourious Basterds is teeming with film references, from the title (a riff on Enzo Castellari’s 1978 The Inglorious Bastards) to propaganda movie parodies (Nation’s Pride). Its legacy lies in minting Christoph Waltz’s status as the verbose villain of the noughties (“That’s a bingo!” became a catchphrase) and paving the way for more QT revisionism, from Westerns to ’60s Hollywood. A double bill of Inglourious Basterds and Rick Dalton’s ‘The 14 Fists Of Mccluskey’ might just be movie nirvana.