INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

2009/Director: Quentin Tarantino/Writer: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl

I have to admit that I really did not enjoy this Quentin Tarantino film at all but I really, really wanted to. I waited for this with high expectations. In fact I still want to be able to write something about it and sound like I am one of the special people (one of the many people) who got the film’s ‘message’ and consider it to be Taratino’s best work to date. I read that the film got an eight minute standing ovation at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival. From me it got shut off wit my remote and finished a couple nights later out of a sense of obligation (maybe to just write something abut it here, the worst reason to watch a film maybe) more than a passion to see the rest of the story. And while I am at it I will have to say I was let down, though much less so, with his Grindhouse Death Proof feature as well. The last thing I liked by the guy was Jackie Brown and just feel he has lost his once marvelous mojo since that film. I will be direct. Inglourious Basterds had too much banter and not enough gutsy action in it for me. Sure Tarantino could once create riveting dialog about Quarter Pounders in France but the dialogs in Basterds, a script he reportedly worked on for nearly a decade, simply drug on and on and lacked any of the wit and humor one watches his earlier films over and over for.

I really had my hopes for this film and so I probably am all the more miserable for having them dashed so unexpectedly. I had been reading about Tarantino doing a WW II combat film loosely based on The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare for a couple years now and could hardly wait. I imagined all the cool dialog and character conflicts and humor that such a story could allow but I also pictured actual combat. Guns shooting people. Of course that does happen here and there for tortuously brief moments but the actual combat and battles seems to be done with sly innuendos and witty jabs over the dinner table than in a battle field or shell blasted side-street somewhere. At nearly three hours long I kept losing interest in the characters. Brad Pitt as Tennessee born Lt. Aldo Raine (maybe a play on action character actor Aldo Ray) is the leader of the Basterds which is a group of specially trained commandos that have been raising hell behind enemy lines with the Nazis since the early days of the war. I am not sure how I feel about the idea that the group is made up solely of Jews, except for Raine,  bent on revenge and terror. I do not see it as remotely necessary to make the group all Jewish and if there is some message here I missed it. I also do not like the way the Basterds simply come into existence with little explanation of who they are as individuals. In fact the Basterds all but vanish from the middle part of the story while a series of painfully long and drawn scenes occur one after the other in restaurants and coffee shops between various Nazis and French citizens. And to add to the agony that the majority of the dialog occurs in German and French. That is okay for the most part but well over half of the dialog in the film is in French or German and the puns and clever Tarantino phrases that make the scenes in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill quotable and priceless are all lost here. There is, for an example, a scene of a group of spies in a tavern who have as their guest an uninvited SS officer who causes stress levels among the group to jump off of the chart. The problem is not that the dialog here is in another language than English but that it goes on for too damned long and when things finally erupted in gunfire I was in a state where I just did not care.

Some people have said the film was too violent but I feel it was not violent enough. There is not enough action and mayhem to make up for the long attempts at Tarantinoesque banter in German or French. While actor Christoph Waltz is simply great as the Jew Hunting Nazi Col. Landa I just was not excited by any of the other character’s or the actors performances. In particular I was utterly bored by Brad Pitt’s weary performance. He is one of my favorite actors and I was picturing some sort of Lee Marvin type character here and it was maybe the worst performance of this fine actor’s career. And like the joke from Annie Hall about the bad food at some restaurant in the Catskills (paraphrased): A: The food here is so bad. B: Yes. And such small portions. I did not like his performance and he was simply not on the screen enough. I though the film was about him and his elite squad of killer Jews but they the people one sees the least. Eli Roth as the baseball bat welding ‘Jew Bear’ is goofy at best. Definitely not imposing or larger than life. Tarantino has said that this was actually a Spaghetti Western with a WW II backdrop. Well crap man, just make a Spaghetti Western then. Or maybe not. Why muck that classic genre up as well. What the hell happened here? I wanted to see Nazis being blasted with a Tommy Gun and Panzer tanks terrorizing tough talking G.I.s from Brooklyn, instead I get to see Nazi’s put out cigarettes in cheese cake and wax philosophically about rats and squirrels. Hey, lots of people like this one. I would, and have, watched many previous Tarantino effort more than once. Including Death Trap. Hell I love that scene where that gal’s leg soars through the night sky. But, and say this with regret, this is one Tarantino film that I will not watch again.  Am I saying that it is totally terrible film and not worth a watching? No way and let me clear on that point before shifting gears for a bit.  It is, in the end, a Tarantino film and even a bad Tarantino film is better than most other films coming out of either Hollywood of the foreign market these days. And in the end will I probably give the film another go someday… yea I probably will. I am still in the bitter let down phase right now. Like the trusting girl who has sworn off men after she finds her boyfriend in bed with her best friend. But eventually we all regain some faith in men, humanity and Quentin. My opnion is just that, my opinion and is not the final word on anything.

But there are a couple other war dramas I have seen more than a couple times and will probably see again. These films may have inspired Tarantino’s war drama but his story falls way short of at least two of these great war epics, The Dirty Dozen and Iron Cross. The third film is not a great film but is notable in that it was the inspiration for the title of Tarantino’s dreary adventure. That film is called, with proper spelling, The Inglorious Bastards. Lets take a brief look at those films before leaving this subject behind. At the end of the article I hope I will have something positive to say about Inglourious Basterds. I may just need some time to reflect while saying  something about these other films.

THREE FILMS THAT INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

SHOULD HAVE RIPPED OFF BETTER

THE DIRTY DOZEN

1967/Director: Robert Aldrich/ Writers: Nunnally Johnson, Lukas Heller

Cast: Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Richard Jaeckel, George Kennedy, Trini López,  Robert Ryan, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, Clint Walker

This 1967 Robert Aldrich film is still one of the best war films ever made. In some ways it is similar to Inglourious Basterds in that there is not that much actual combat with the Nazis themselves and much of the conflict is between the members of the special team, various officers and commanders and later some tension with the Nazis while the squad is undercover behind enemy lines in occupied France. When the fighting does break out however it is pretty good and not over in a flash. Lee Marvin as Major Reismen is a thoroughly more developed and interesting character than Pitt’s shallow Lt. Raine. This is not necessarily a fault of Pitt’s as he did not even have that much time on screen or decent lines and conflicts to deal with. Reismen is in charge of a group of twelve military convicts whom he must whip into a top notch fighting unit in order to carry a secret mission. The mission involves them getting behind enemy lines and into occupied France prior to the D-Day invasion and taking out the members of the German high command who are partaking in an event being held at a Chateau.

While some people have praised Inglourious Basterds story for being told more from the perspective of the German’s and French I myself found that to be a major issue. In the Dirty Dozen the characters of of each of the twelve soldiers are  given some development to some degree. Particular attention is given to the characters played by Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown and John Cassevetes. But the other characters are introduced during the course of the film and the soldiers played by Clint Walker and Donald Southerland become real people who actually speak lines once in a while. Also in the film are Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, George Kennedy and Richard Jaeckel.  The friction between Marvin’s Maj. Reismen and Ryan’s Col. Breed is well acted and believable. Salavas as the psycho Maggott is classic. In the end you wind up caring for the soldiers and want them to make it. Some of the deaths of the good guys are upsetting, in particualr Jim Brown’s and even John Cassevetes’s (as sleazy Franko). The scene of the Germans hysterically trying to dislodge hand grenades from the air vents as gasoline pours down over them was controversial for the time and was censored from some versions of the film. Even though not a blood of blood was shown in the scene nor was a burning Nazi ever shown the drama is powerful and effective.

The soldiers develop and mature as the film unfolds and we are able to make various connections with them. We know who the Dirty Dozen actually are. We never get any sort of connection with the Basterds. None really. The most developed characters are Eli Roth (not even a real actor) as the Bear Jew Donny Donowitz and some other guy who survives until the end with Brad Pitt but I forget who the hell he was and what his name was or why his character was special enough to make it out alive (the way Charles Bronson’s Wladisaw did in The Dirty Dozen) or why I would even care. The mission and the men’s motivation in The Dirty Dozen are clear but in Basterd’s it is all hazy at best. I liked the Dirty Dozen soldiers, even Maggott, more than the Basterds. I am not shocked by film violence but I saw no point in some of it the Basterds. For example, scalping Nazis, etching a Swastika on their foreheads with a Bowie knife or beating hapless prisoners to death with a baseball bat. Okay Maggot did knife a terrified ‘strumpet’ to death but at least we are clear as to why he did this. He was a religious psycho. Why Donowitz uses a baseball bat is never made clear as well as well as why Raine likes having his team scalping dead Nazis. As well we are never really introduced to the character in the Basterds named Stiglitz who likes killing Nazi officers. Why does he like doing this? And even if he does why would he team up with the enemy? Just because he hates Nazi officers does not mean he will like enemy troops any more. And the whole break out scene for Stiglitz by the Basterds was wasted potential. How did the Basterds, no matter how good they are, get into a tightly guarded German prison or stockade and bust this guy out then escape? The Dirty Dozen does not make these sorts of mistakes with the story line.

There re, of course, problems in The Dirty Dozen as well such as would it really be that easy to take over Breed’s HQ during the war games sequence? Probably not but at the least the story tries to address and resolve the matter. And, for me, the bottom line is that the story focuses on the actual Dirty Dozen. It does not spend 80% of its time on the Germans they will kill later or French freedom fighters they will never meet. While Tarantino’s film does not try to make the Nazis  likable or even victims of  enemy ‘atrocities’ the way Eastwood’s and Spielberg’s Letters from Iwo Jima did with the Imperial Japanese it still spent too much time with the Krauts and not enough with the Yanks. The scene in Basterds where the band of infiltrators sit around a tavern playing a stupid guessing game with an SS officer seemed longer than the entire training sequence of the soldiers in The Dirty Dozen. The length of the training sequence of the Basterds? Not a single second. The card guessing game length? Maybe thirty five friggin’ minutes full of ‘witty’ dialog in German with subtitles!

Look I like war films where the Yanks kill the bad guys. Screw all this blurring of the lines of good and evil. The Dirty Dozen did it well enough without making the Americans look nearly as evil as the Nazis. I want to see Nazis, Imperial Japanese, Vietcong and Taliban wackos killed by the ‘good guys’.  I think The Dirty Dozen took criminal soldiers and turned them into heroes while Inglourious Basterds showed the allied troops as blood thirsty scalpers and mutilators. In one scene a female spy posing as a German actress shoots an kills a frightened and surrendering Nazi soldier who just wants to get home to see his new born kid. It was a scene that could have gone somewhere else but it takes the cheap shot and easy way out and shows that the ‘good guys’ are no better than the Nazis. I don’t agree and never will.

The next war film takes the point of view entirely from the German side of things but leaves out the Western allies in favor of showing the conflict on the Eastern front with the Soviet Union in Sam Peckinpah’s Iron Cross.

Expect a more detailed review and new vidcaps of The Dirty Dozen here someday. These vicaps were found on the net and seem okay but time for some new ones for this film. As well the film needs a longer exploration by myself as it is very influential on my film watching attitudes and habits of today.

CROSS OF IRON

1977/Director: Sam Peckinpah/Writers: Julius J. Epstein, James Hamilton

Cast: James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, James Mason, David Warner

Cross of Iron is a Sam Peckinpah film and while it is considered by critics to be not only one of his best films, and one of the best films of all time period, it was a commercial flop here in the states and is still for the most part an unknown film except for Peckinpah aficionados. As far as story line goes Inglourious Basterds seems to have little from this film. At least less than the other films mentioned here. In fact what I wish is that Basterds drawn more from The Dirty Dozen and Cross of Iron than it did. One thing that Cross of Iron shares with Basterds is that it is told from the perspective of the Nazis than the allies. In fact Cross of Iron is told only from the German soldier’s point of view and the allies here are not the Americans or British but the Soviets on the Eastern front.

The Germans are losing the 1943 battle for the Kuban region near the Black Sea and will soon be in retreat. In the middle of all this is Corp. Steiner played by James Coburn in one of the best roles of his career. Steiner is sick and tired of the war and maybe sick and tired of the whole human race. The only thing he hates more than the actual war is the officers and aristocrats who started it all. Steiner is educated but from the lower class and his ultimate adversary soon arrives not in the form of the uniformed enemy but in the form of the high born Prussian aristocrat Capt. Stransky played brilliantly by Maximillian Schell. Steiner has been awarded the Iron Cross for bravery in battle. Stransky’s sole mission in coming to the front is to acquire the Iron Cross and take back to show off to his family and acquaintances. Stransky is none too keen on the methods and views of the low born but highly respected Steiner. How can this man without a drop of high bred blood in his veins have the Iron Cross while he, a man of class and bearing, not have it?

Steiner is a tough soldier and  no doubt the type of soldier that helped Hitler’s cause to nearly succeed. But he hates the uniform he wears and his loyalty is to under his command. Hs promoted to Sgt. by Stransky and shows little excitement about the raise in command status. He saves a Russian soldier boy from execution according to Stransky’s orders only to see the lad shot mistakenly by his own troops later. In the underground barracks there is camaraderie with his dirty and foul smelling troops. Later in the film he loses many of these men when Stransky betrays the company and leaves them stranded in the face of a Russian assault. The men, mostly, make it through enemy lines and back to the new German camp only to be shot down by their fellow troops at Stransky’s command. The final scene of grunt Steiner laughing uncontrollably as high born Stransky fumbles around trying to figure out to reload his machine gun is a lasting image. The film deals with ironies and class struggles that are universal. We can sympathize with the ‘good guys’ even though they are Nazi’s because they are not fighting and killing Americans of British troops but rather Russians. And of course the Russians were allies as well and suffered horribly in the war and fought heroically but lets be honest, they were still Red Communists so when a few get blasted by Steiner and his company it does not affect our psyche the way it would if they were blasting freckled faced boys from Oklahoma.

Also turning in fine performances are James Mason and David Warner as tired and cynical but basically loyal to ‘the cause’ officers who both respect and hate Steiner but simply hate Stransky and his goal of acquiring the Iron Cross at any cost. They want to enlist Steiner in their efforts to legally bring Stransky down but Steiner is as hostile to their motivations as he is Stransky’s. The film suffers from a modest budget in places such the repeated use of a couple Soviet tanks to represent a full on armored Soviet assault. As is common in many Peckinpah films the female characters, if the actually exist, are evil little things at best. Here a band of Soviet female troops captured by Steiner’s men use their sexy wiles to trick a young and trusting German soldiers into getting knifed to death and biting the penis off another soldier during fellatio by a ‘willing’ Red soldier gal. The women are portrayed as a pack of bloodthirsty wolves practically.

The story here is kept tight and the conflict is between the German’s of different ranks and class themselves most of the time more than the enemy. Again there is not a constant state of combat going on. At one point Steiner spends time in a war hospital recovering from a severe concussion and there has a brief affair with a nurse. When the action does happen it is in trademark Peckinpah style, violent and in well shot slow motion. The film is dark and pessimistic. Hitler and his cronies are not assassinated in a fantasy revenge scene as in Inglourious Basterds. The war trudges on to its dark conclusion, the officers and men on the Eastern front keenly aware that the war has long been lost and when it is over they will have nothing to return home to any longer.  Simply a great anti-war film that has been praised by filmmakers of no less importance than Orson Welles.

THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS (Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato)

1978/Director: Enzo G. Castellari/Writers: Sandro Continenza, Sergio Grieco

Cast: Bo Svenson, Peter Hooten, Fred Williamson, Michael Pergolani, Jackie Basehart, Michel Constantin

DUE TO A MISTAKE ON MY PART THIS POST WAS PUBLISHED PREMATURELY. STILL WRITING IT ACTUALLY. PLEASE  OVER LOOK MY TYPOS AND MISTAKES FOR NOW. THEY SHOULD BE CORRECTED SOON. INGLORIOUS BASTARDS (THE ABOVE FILM) WILL BE FINISHED EVENTUALLY. I PROMISE

BILL

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Action and Adventure, War and Combat . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.