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| Images courtesy of Arrow Video |
Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 Nazisploitation epic Inglourious
Basterds loosely derived from Enzo G. Castellari’s 1978 film The
Inglorious Bastards represents the first time the boutique label Arrow
Video have attempted one of the maestro’s movies. A project dating back to the late 1990s that
got put on hold while Kill Bill took center stage, it was a
co-production between America and Germany with shooting taking place entirely
on location in Germany and France. At
the time, preceding Django Unchained, it was Tarantino’s most
commercially successful film taking in around $321 million on a $70 million
production budget. Something of a major
comeback for Tarantino after the commercial failure of Grindhouse which
included his segment Death Proof, the film garnered eight Academy Award
nominations including Best Picture while singlehandedly ushering in the major
screen talent of Christoph Waltz who won the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor
Award. Still, in a post-Kill Bill age
with its cartoonish ultraviolence paying homage to Nikkatsu and Shaw Brothers
films, Inglourious Basterds despite being grounded in real world history
is perhaps the director’s most cartoony revisionist offering in his entire
oeuvre even after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Broken up into disparate chapters but seemingly told in
chronological order as opposed to Tarantino’s usual MO of jumping around the timeline
in a nonlinear fashion, Inglourious Basterds opens famously on the introduction
of SS officer Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) as self-proclaimed ‘The Jew Hunter’ relentlessly
interrogating a French dairy farmer about a fugitive Jewish family called the
Dreyfuses. Like many of Tarantino’s
character introductions, the tension and buildup is all delivered through
dialogue much of which is bilingual fluctuating in and out of French, German
and English sometimes in the same sentence.
It is a spectacular, larger than life performance that immediately
cemented Waltz into the Hollywood mainstream.
From here Landa massacres the family but one escapee, Shosanna, makes it
out alive and grows up to become a Parisian cinema operator now using the pseudonym
Emmanuel Mimieux (Melanie Laurent).
Jumping ahead three years, US Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt)
builds a ragtag team of Jewish-American soldiers nicknamed the ‘Basterds’
trained on killing and scalping Nazis or carving swastikas in their foreheads
with knives in occupied France. Among
them includes Donny ‘The Bear Jew’ Donowitz (Eli Roth), a rogue German sergeant
Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) and an Austrian translator. Meanwhile Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth)
and Adolf Hitler (Martin Wuttke) are planning a major new propaganda film to
premiere at Emmanuel’s Parisian cinema.
When the idea is presented to Emmanuel including after being
interrogated by none other than Landa the murderer of her family, she hatches
the idea with her African-French lover and projectionist Marcel (Jacky Ido) to
burn down the theater the night of the film with all the Nazis in attendance
with her highly flammable collection of nitrate theatrical prints. At the same time, the Basterds hatch their
own plan to further riddle the fateful premiere with their own subset of
bullets and explosives.
Despite the pedigree of the international cast with
Christoph Waltz being a wonder unto himself who all but completely walks away
with the film, other factors bring the piece down like Brad Pitt’s hammy and
forced Nazi hunter. His caricature while
intended as a joke misuses the actors’ talents which were far better played out
in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Eli Roth is himself a good horror director, film critic and obviously
Tarantino’s buddy, but his Bear Jew didn’t work for me then and it still doesn’t
work for me now. Then there’s the stunt
casting of Mike Myers as General Ed Fenech opposite then-unknown Michael
Fassbender and while Myers plays it straight, buried under all that makeup I kept
waiting for him to break out of character and chew the scenery whole. Melanie Laurent as the young cinema owner has
since made quite a career for herself, appearing in numerous major Hollywood
films including Now You See Me and 6 Underground. The rest of the ensemble cast is largely
French or German speaking and it is a testament to the devotion of Tarantino
fans to take a film where a majority of the dialogue is not in English.
Visually speaking the film is a tour-de-force with Oliver
Stone cinematographer Robert Richardson’s trademark hard lighting and use of
scope are luminous and even radiant. The
film doesn’t have an original score, just a cacophony of Tarantino’s familiar
needle drops including David Bowie’s theme for Paul Schrader’s Cat People and
music from John Wayne’s The Alamo by Dimitri Tiomkin. A key needle drop announcing the arrival of Landa at a restaurant utilizes Charles Bernstein's ghostly rape horror cue from The Entity, again signifying terror and Tarantino's deep cut understanding of screen music in general. All of the technical elements from the
production design to the precise and punctuated editing by Sally Menke are top
notch superb and Tarantino clearly has total command of the cinematic medium
and can play his audience like a piano.
And yet the film is nevertheless hampered by the supporting
performances, namely of the Basterds themselves and the most important
characters in the film are the lead SS officer and the projectionist. Everyone else including Hitler just kind of
fall to the wayside.
Arrow Video, given this is their first Tarantino pickup,
have pulled out all the stops in creating a deluxe limited-edition
release. Replete with a hardbound box
with original sleeve art by Dare Creative, a sixty-page booklet with essay writing
by Dennis Cozzalio and Bill Ryan, a replica of the Nation’s Pride Premiere Booklet
used in the film, a La Louisianne beermat and even a strudel recipe card. The film comes with a new audio commentary by
Tim Lucas while the extras port over all the original Universal archival extras
on the first blu-ray release as well as newly rendered interviews with Greg
Nicotero, Omar Doom, a visual essay by Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central and a
documentary about films made under German occupation in France including Henri
Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau.
Fans of the film will not be disappointed with this upgrade while those
were left underwhelmed by what is, let’s be real, Tarantino’s weakest film,
will think twice before forking over the price tag. In any event, curious to see whether or not
the boutique label will take on anymore Tarantino titles in the near future.
--Andrew Kotwicki
