Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds runs 153 minutes and opens with a promise: “Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France…” It is a war film, a thriller, and a revenge drama at once, and it earns all three labels.
The film follows Lt. Aldo Raine and his squad of Jewish-American soldiers, the Basterds, who are sent into occupied France to spread fear through the Third Reich by killing and scalping Nazis. Along the way they cross paths with Shosanna, a French-Jewish teenager who runs a Paris movie theater — a theater the German high command eventually targets for a premiere. The collision of those two stories is the engine of the film, and it is a well-built engine.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures Home Entertainment Benelux.
Aldo Raine and His Squad
Brad Pitt plays Lt. Aldo Raine, the squad’s leader, and the film gives him the kind of entrance that sets a tone rather than a plot. The Basterds are not a unit in the military sense. They are a scare tactic, chosen for the job of making the Reich feel hunted.
Eli Roth plays SGT. Donny Donowitz, the man the film frames as the squad’s most feared instrument. Til Schweiger is SGT. Hugo Stiglitz, and Gedeon Burkhard is CPL. Wilhelm Wicki. B.J. Novak and Omar Doom round out the squad as PFC. Smithson Utivich and PFC. Omar Ulmer.
The film spends real time on how these men operate, and the violence is not decoration. It is the method. The Basterds exist to make the enemy afraid, and the film takes that premise seriously enough to show the work. That choice gives the middle of the film a blunt, ugly momentum that most war pictures avoid.
Shosanna Runs a Theater in Paris
Mélanie Laurent plays Shosanna, and her story is the film’s quieter half. She runs a movie theater in Paris, and she is Jewish, and she is hiding in plain sight. The German war machine decides to use her theater for a premiere, which puts her at the center of an event she never asked to host. Jacky Ido plays Marcel, who works with her at the theater.
The genius of this thread is that it makes the cinema itself a weapon. Shosanna’s theater is not a backdrop. It is the location of the film’s climax, and the film treats the building as a character with a function. Tarantino wrote the script as well as directing, and the Shosanna material shows the tighter, more patient half of his writing.
Hans Landa Talks Before He Shoots
Christoph Waltz plays COL. Hans Landa, and the film’s reputation rests heavily on him. Landa is the SS officer who hunts Jews in France, and he is charming in a way that makes every scene he enters feel dangerous. Waltz made the role the film’s most quoted performance, and the source material gives him the film’s most memorable presence.
Landa is not a brute. He is a talker, and the film lets him talk. The scenes where he questions people are the film’s best-constructed set pieces, because they are built on language rather than gunfire. That is a rare thing in a war film, and it is the reason the film holds up.
Hicox, von Hammersmark and the Premiere Plan
Michael Fassbender plays LT. Archie Hicox, a British officer who joins the operation. Diane Kruger plays Bridget von Hammersmark, a German actress working as an Allied agent. Daniel Brühl plays Fredrick Zoller, a German soldier and war hero who becomes central to the premiere. The film brings these threads together in a plan to strike at the German leadership inside Shosanna’s theater.
This is where the film’s structure pays off. The Basterds, the actress, the British officer, and the theater owner all converge on the same night. The film does not rush the convergence. It lets the pieces sit, and the tension comes from the audience knowing more than the characters in the room.
Bowie, R&B and a Rerecorded Sombrero
The soundtrack to Inglourious Basterds was released on August 18, 2009. It uses a range of music, including Spaghetti Western soundtrack excerpts, R&B, and a David Bowie song from the 1982 remake of Cat People. “The Man with the Big Sombrero,” a song from the 1943 screwball comedy Hi Diddle Diddle, was rerecorded in French for the film.
The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media, but lost to the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack. It is also the first soundtrack for a Tarantino film not to feature dialogue excerpts. That last detail matters more than it sounds. Tarantino’s earlier soundtracks worked partly as radio plays, with the dialogue carrying the music. Here the music has to stand alone, and it does.
Release Dates and Runtime
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| August 18, 2009 | Soundtrack release |
| 2009 | Film release |
| 153 minutes | Runtime |
The film runs 153 minutes, which is long for a war picture and longer than the material strictly needs. The middle section, where the Basterds operate in the field, could lose ten minutes without damage. The Shosanna material and the Landa material could not lose a minute.
Where the Film Stands
That imbalance is the film’s main flaw. Tarantino has two films inside one, and one of them is sharper than the other. The Basterds thread is a genre exercise. The Landa and Shosanna threads are something closer to a thriller, and they are what the film is remembered for. The film’s best decision is to treat language as a weapon. Landa’s scenes work because the danger is in what he says and how he says it.
Inglourious Basterds is a war film that is really about performance. Waltz’s Landa is the performance of a man who has made cruelty into a social skill. Laurent’s Shosanna is the performance of a woman who has made survival into a daily routine. Pitt’s Raine is the performance of a man who has made violence into a personality. The film puts all three in the same building and lets them play off each other.
The soundtrack’s Grammy loss to Slumdog Millionaire is not a scandal. The Slumdog soundtrack was the bigger cultural event that year. But the Inglourious Basterds album is the stranger, more interesting record, and the Bowie choice is the kind of decision that only Tarantino would make.
The film’s legacy rests on Waltz. He is the reason the film is quoted, the reason the film is studied, and the reason the film’s 153 minutes feel shorter than they are when he is on screen. The Basterds are the poster. Landa is the film.
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