Reel Politique: Links of Interest, Inglorious Basterds
Like half the people on the Internet, I have just finished reading Inglorious Basterds, as the script’s author prefers to spell the word. The other half is trying to find it before the text is scrubbed from the world wide web. New York magazine’s Vulture column offers the most professional summary of the script and raise the valid question of its authenticity, which we will come to later. I read it yesterday, and then again today. The first time through, I hated it. The dialogue, for which in other films Tarantino is justifiably famous, was wretched, the plot over the top, and sprinkled with a series of outlandish characters offered little or no screen weight. Hitler makes a cameo and is such a spittle-ejecting parody of the mad Furher you think you’re reading Springtime for Hitler II. At times I even thought, No, this is a comedy, a straightforward comedy like a ’50s military comedy, this isn’t meant to be taken seriously at all. But after thinking about it a lot, and discussing it with friends, and giving it a re-read, I’ve come to the conclusion that Inglorious Basterds would be one hell of a movie, one of Tarantino’s best; that its “problem” is that the movie isn’t as much on the page as his previous films; and that it is probably the best marriage of Samuel Fuller and the nouvelle vague since Pierrot le fou.
Of course, the first thing you do with a new Tarantino script is try to catalog all the sources. It is known that the director has borrowed the irresistible title from a 1978 actioner directed by Enzo G. Castellari and starring Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson (in Italy it’s Quel maledetto treno blindato). And that the “sources” for the films are a catalog of WWII, Vietnam, and spaghetti western films directed by the likes of Sergio Corbucci, Antonio Margheriti, Lucio Fulci, and others, along with American “mission” films such as The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare (but probably not Cross of Iron; Tarantino apparently doesn’t care for Peckinpah that much). But Samuel Fuller is a key influence. As is the Godardian era of the French New Wave, the look of the women and the gritty black and white shooting style of Raoul Coutard . I even think there is a great deal of the old wonderfully chaotic Marvel comic Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos in the script, though I have no idea if Tarantino ever read the comic, or if it is a conscious influence. 
I started to like the script the second time around when I realized that the movie isn’t necessarily on the page. It’s still in his head. To “feel” the movie, you have to see it the way Tarantino must be seeing it, through the Gespatzo of scores of Italian and French films. Take the first sequence, which covers about the first 18 pages, offers a good test. In essence what happens is that the film’s villain, a Nazi Colonel named Landa, nicknamed crudely “The Jew Hunter,” is visiting a French dairy farm that he suspects is hiding the Dreyfuss family, the only one of four families in the area to elude capture. The old farmer, LaPeditte, sees the convey of Nazis arriving, tries to sort out his wife and three daughters from the approaching trouble, but when Landa emerges from his car, he is all politeness, graciousness, and concern. Eventually, Landa and LaPeditte are in the farmer’s simple kitchen, drinking milk and discussing just where in the world those Jews might be. The dialogue is dragged out and methodical, and Landa is precise and highly solicitous toward the farmer. It all comes across rather flat and over long, even though the material is supposed to comprise a suspense scene. However, if the reader visualizes and audioizes the sequence the way Tarantino probably did as he composed it, as a sequence from a Sergio Leone film, such as the openings of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, or Once Upon a Time in the West, with carefully selected sound effects, huge close-ups in a gradually accreting rhythmic pace, before eventually exploding in an elating blast of Ennio Morricone-style lush and romantic music (spelled “Morriconie” in the script), then the sequence becomes “cinematic.”
For a movie about a team of WWII marauders, the story of the team’s creation and what happens to most of them is given short shrift. Those parts of the screenplay feel rushed. By contrast, Tarantino has invested a lot in Landa, the “Bill” of this equally long movie. He is erected as a cunning superNazi about four steps ahead of everybody and with hypersharp observational skills. He understands human nature better than anyone else in the film. You’d think that the leader of the marauders, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, a “hillbilly from the mountains of Tennessee,” would be the center of Tarantino’s emotional and intellectual commitment, but rather it is Landa as a mastermind, and Shosanna Dreyfuss, a girl who escapes from Landa at the beginning and within a few years ends up running a Cinematheque francaise-style movie house in Paris, where she enacts an elaborate gesture of revenge, one that utilizes cinema and announces the death of cinema. It’s an interesting moment in the film when Tarantino choses the use the destruction of 300-plus rare nitrate prints as fuel for her fiery revenge. Tarantino contrasts Shosanna’s elaborately staged revenge with the practices of Raine’s men, all of whom are Jewish and who seek to create terror among German soldiers. Like Mickey and Mallory, they like to leave one of them alive, though scared with a swastika carved in his forehead, to bear witness to other Germans about how vicious Raine’s men tend to be. Shosanna’s approach is a complex, nuanced one-time plan in which she wants to use her “big face” on the screen to rub her revenge in the noses of the Nazis. On another matter, the actual end of the movie feels abrupt, but in the manner of Death Proof which it resembles in immediacy and population.
The screenplay’s authenticity has been called into question, which is understandable since fake Tarantinos have popped up on the Internet before (in fact, this writer was fooled by a clever fake Tarantino blog back in 2003). I have it on good authority that it’s the real thing, however, and from internal evidence, it feels authentic. Lines of dialogue such as Landa’s “This being a dairy farm one would be safe in assuming you have milk?”, the habitual use of white trash conversational cliches, and the breaking up of the story into five “chapters” all sound very Tarantino to this reader (though there is little of Tarantino’s trademark narrative playfulness: this aspect of the script really does feel like someone doing a poor Tarantino imitation). But even if it is a fake, it should be filmed, and by Tarantino himself. It would be interesting to see how he pulls off the middle section of the movie, which is meant to be a visual homage to the French New Wave.
But the question, now that the script has bled all over the Internet, and therefore the world, is, Will it get made? The Weinstein Company, the film’s presumptive home, is is by all accounts going under, and the script’s leaking gives other producers an excuse to say no, the easiest word in Hollywood to utter. The 4000 other Internet “news” stories about the film are all based on Nikki Finke’s reporting, and the substance seems to be that the Weinsteins want to make the film but are seeking another studio with which to partner, which is why the script was circulated, and which is presumably how it found its way to the WWW.
Meanwhile there are other competing WWII movies with similar elements, such as the Tom Cruise movie, Valkyrie about the assassination attempt on Hitler by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg. And Inglorious Basterds will surely be an expensive movie: it’s set in the past, in Europe and Paris, with lots of costumes and explosions. Taken together, the two parts of Kill Bill apparently cost $85 million dollars. But trusting Tarantino with over $100 million for his odd film, especially when routine movies routinely cost $200 million or more, should be mostly risk free for someone in Hollywood.
There have been a surprising number of WWII movies lately and for some reason viewers seem to forget them. Downfall, Days of Glory, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Pianist all made some impression, but the film closet to Tarantino’s craziness is Verhoeven’s Black Book, with which Inglorious Basterds some general plot movements.
In fact once the reader gets past the nutty surface detail and extreme, nearly comic digressions that pad out the tale, Inglorious Basterds is a tragic tale of damaged people, individuals, that is, damaged long before before the war started (Aldo has a rope burn around his neck from an unexplained lynching incident). They went into it all messed up, and the decisions they make are fully informed by the twists in their psyche caused by the real world, which the world of war only exacerbates, while also distorting their sense of right and wrong. Perhaps the best text to read as a background to the eventual finished film is Nicholson Baker’s fascinating anthology, Human Smoke (Simon & Schuster, 576 pages, $30, ISBN-13: 978-1416567844), a daring collection of quotes whose cumulative effect is to call into question many of the decisions made concerning WWII and the quality of mind and morality of those who made them. In tandem with Human Smoke, and despite its roots in about 400 ’70s Italian movies, Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds gives us a whole new war.
July 13th, 2008 at 1:28 am
Too bad i didnt come across this blog before. Great stuff you got here. Thanks.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I’ve finished reading the script last night and I think your first reaction was the right reaction Mr Holm. This is a really disappointing script.
The promise of a return to the old exploitation world war two action flicks, the possibility of an all star line up, even the title ‘Inglorious Bastards’ pointed to a deliciously subversive, unrestrained action flick. Instead the (rather stale) script feels like 30 per cent action and 70 per cent talk and the talk aint even that good. What we have is an action film whose scene’s are sloppy and overlong, while the audience sits there worrying what they’re missing out on so that we can hear characters play a game of ‘Who Am I?’ for 10 pages.
The Inglorious bastards themselves are woefully underdeveloped. The only substantially built character is the Aldo-Brad Pitt character and his one distinguishing character trait seems to be his southern drawl.
Perhaps I’m projecting too many of expectations here but the script should have been much more focused on the bastards team - how they were chosen, more of their mythology and idiosyncracies, how they work together, their dynamic, kick-ass one liners. As it is they’re practically marginalised, their few scenes generic and uninteresting. The script gives us brief glimpses of them early on before they disappear for half the movie (only to return with a script direction telling us ‘those that who have not reappeared from the first scene are dead’ - what the hell happened to them?).
Half the movie is concerned with the Jewish female heroine Shosanna (ala Black Book), which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing but she has so little to do with the bastards that her role seems utterly pointless (aside from making some commentary on cinema and violence).
Landa is certainly the most interesting character and I think the first scene with him and the French farmer is the best in the script - but by the final ‘twist’ he feels just like any other stock movie villain.
In terms of action, although it’s hard to tell from a script, it felt dismally uncreative and stale - there’s little sense of fun to the action ala Kelly’s Heroes.
To be honest, this script feels like it was written by a 14 year old. Unless Tarantino can pull a rabbit out of a hat in the direction department, this is going to be another disappointment in the order of Death Proof (possibly worse).
July 19th, 2008 at 11:12 am
To Psychic Advice, you’re welcome.
To Witt, I certainly agree with many of your criticism of the screenplay, as a script (written by a 14-year-old, under-developed characters). However, one of the points I was trying to make is that the movie is really in Tarantino’s head, and the script may not reflect fully what he has in mind. For example, I have a feeling that he is still on an aesthetic roll from Death Proof, which also had a lot of rambling talk, but also undermined expectations. For example, here everyone expects a WWII “mission” film with a lot of eccentric team members, but Tarantino kills off the majority of them off screen. Assuming that this approach is intentional, Tarantino does not want to make a conventional mission movie, but something else, and there are obvious clues in the script, such as the middle section being shot like a French New Wave movie. The script can come off badly especially on a first read, but I am giving it the benefit of the doubt, at least for now.
August 11th, 2008 at 3:34 am
Interesting reading all the points and opinions of those before me. I think everyone seems to be reading too much into the fact this is a Tarantino movie. We are all being caught up with the hype and bravado the way Mr Tarantino wants us to be. If you recall his Kill Bill script was much better in flesh then it was in actual film and as such he may be reversing the roles this time. Playing with his audience. Anyone who can “have” such child like writing and deliberately mis-spell words must be doing so for a reason. I beg the world to ignore the hype and treat it the way PF and RD were treated when they were first released. Who knows, by next year’s Cannes Film Festival we may just be in for something very different and revolutionary, like most of his work.
August 14th, 2008 at 6:59 am
If that script (now available on every pirate site on the Internet) is really QT’s work, I’m afraid that Hollywood’s idiot-savant director has finally surrendered his savantness. To sum it up: it’s a crackerbox full of tiny plastic people, popcorn-like cinematic cliches, caramel-syrupy sentiment, and a crazy-as-nuts-itself Turtledovian alternate-history ending. I pray to God that this is a hoax, because if this movie is ever made, I’m that it will finally signal THE END…that ‘cinema’ has finally devolved into the self-referential, self-parody that define Art Deco and rap music.