Has there ever been a better movie title than 1978’s Inglorious Bastards? Okay, actually, a glance at the other credits of the cast and crew reveals several strong contenders—actor Michael Pergolani once wrote a movie called No Thanks, Coffee Makes Me Nervous and director Enzo G. Castellari once made a movie called Go Kill Everybody and Come Back Alone. But for simplicity and sheer blunt force, Inglorious Bastards is hard to beat, and it’s easy to see the appeal it holds for Quentin Tarantino, who’s borrowed it for the title of his upcoming World War II epic. (Am I the only one hoping that they use Tarantino’s spelling? In the script that got leaked to apparently every movie geek in North America earlier this month, the notoriously illiterate director writes it as Inglourious Basterds.)
I’m not connected enough to have scored a copy of the Basterds script, but judging from the reports I’ve read online and having just watched the 1978 original, Tarantino’s plotline veers off deeply into berserk territory all his own. The original is a hugely enjoyable variation on The Dirty Dozen about a group of antisocial, anti-authoritarian GIs who escape from custody on their way to a court martial and wander around the French countryside for a while before stumbling into a secret American mission to commandeer a German train and retrieve a stolen gyroscope. As I understand it, Tarantino adds a significant subplot about a young Jewish woman who runs a movie theatre in Paris, and takes even more delight in killing off Nazis than Castellari does. And Castellari loves killing Nazis—during the big battle scenes, he frequently kills off the same soldiers twice.
I do hope Tarantino preserves this movie’s spirit of adolescent fun. Getting arrested, escaping from the MPs, shooting down Nazis—in Inglorious Bastards, it’s all a lark. (Has any actor made lobbing grenades look more fun than Fred Williamson does in this movie?) Even in the final sequence, when most of our heroes die, the film lingers only momentarily over their deaths—or, really, over their acts of heroism. Triumph, tragedy... in this movie, it’s all just one damn thing after another. At least they all die happy—they were all going to be shot anyway, right?
I haven’t seen any of the spaghetti westerns and Italian gangster movies that make up the rest of Castellari’s résumé, and I get the feeling that he’s generally regarded as kind of a hack, but I really liked what he did with Inglorious Bastards—he never allows the pace to slacken (packing two hours’ worth of plot into a mere 95 minutes), but he also seems to have encouraged a loose acting style among the five leads. I especially loved Peter Hooten’s performance as the lanky, amoral Tony—in his entrance scene, swishing his hips as two soldiers escort him in handcuffs to a waiting truck, he’s almost shockingly fey. (You half-expect him to kiss one of the soldiers on the cheek.) He doesn’t camp it up at all in the rest of the movie, but the impact of that entrance colours the rest of his scenes—you never know what he’s going to do next. And I also loved Michael Pergolani in the comic-relief role of Nick, a petty thief with G. Gordon Liddy’s mustache and the bottomless coat pockets of Harpo Marx.
And as a matter of fact, the battle sequences in Inglorious Bastards are as ridiculous as anything in Duck Soup (although Groucho Marx has considerably better comic timing than Bo Svenson). After Saving Private Ryan, I don’t know if directors can ever go back to this kind of cheerfully bloodless battle scene, where no one really “dies”—they just wave their arms and fall over, or jump out of the frame with a scream when explosions go off under their feet. Perhaps Tarantino’s greatest challenge in his version of Inglorious Bastards will be figuring out how to blend these two styles, to put Private Ryan violence into a Sgt. Rock world.
And to figure out the spellcheck function on his word processor. Spelling it "inglourious" is okay—I'm Canadian, so seeing the occasional extra "u" pop up here and there doesn't bother me—but when you refer to the German dish as "wennersitnitzell," things start to look a little embarrassing.
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