Thursday Minute
No. 10 | January 14, 2010

At the Movies

Our theme this week
Movies set in movie theaters

Featured this week
Monday         —   Sherlock Jr.
Tuesday         —   The Purple Rose of Cairo
Wednesday    —   The Last Picture Show

Inglourious Basterds

The essentials
Once upon a time, you could count on a few things in a World War II movie.  Good guys who fight fair and square, bad guys who don’t, and most of all, a certain chronology of events.  That’s not this kind of movie.  This is a Quentin Tarantino movie.  It’s hardly the first movie about the Big One to play loose with the facts, but any limits that may have applied in the past are blown to smithereens here.

Inglourious Basterds is a revenge fantasy.  It’s got a bit of history, a lot of killing, and yes, even a movie theater.

Le Gamaar is a small Parisian cinema operated by Shosanna Dreyfus, a French Jew whose family was murdered by Nazi Colonel Hans Landa in 1941.  The theater has been Shosanna’s sanctuary during the war.  When she meets German war hero Fredrick Zoller, the star of his own cinematic life story, a propaganda film called Stolz der Nation (“pride of the nation”), he insists that the world premiere be held at her theater.  Attending the premiere will be not only Landa but also much of the German high command, including Joseph Goebbels and Adolph Hitler.  Shosanna plans to make the premiere, and Le Gamaar, the venue for her revenge.  Meanwhile, “the Basterds,” a rogue band of Jewish soldiers led by Southern boy Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), learn of the event.  They storm their way to Paris with their own plot for payback.

The climax takes place while war scenes unfold in the film-within-a-film before the opening night audience.  No surprise, the action isn’t all onscreen, as the theater erupts in fire, gunfire, and explosions.  Shosanna gets her revenge.  So do the Basterds.  Perhaps most of all, so does Tarantino.  No telling just what it is that drives him, but what he delivers is stunning moviemaking, the kind that grabs you in the first scene and never lets go.

Beyond the final credits
One of the more grisly and commented-on aspects of the film is the scalping.  It’s the Basterds’ way of doing business (100 scalps apiece is the order).  That’s a new twist for World War II films, which generally adhere more closely to the historical record.  It’s a genre-bending invention from Tarantino, and the director, in a cameo role, plays one of the Germans who loses his head, so to speak.  In a second bit part, Tarantino plays an American sergeant in Stolz der Nation.

…58…59…60.