Reviewed by Ronald Holloway
(from the 2009 Cannes Film Festival)

Directed/Written by: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Daniel Bruhl, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Mélanie Laurent, Brad Pitt, Eli Roth, Til Schweiger, Christoph Waltz

An actor's film through and through, Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" sees the director exchanging his usual revolver shooting technique for the far more powerful modus of the spoken word. And, so long as the film wanders through the labyrinthine diction of the Third Reich, he comes out a winner.

Part World War II film, part Nazi pop, part historical travesty and, most of all, a once-upon-a-time fairytale, "Inglourious Basterds" (French spelling preferred) hits the ground running as soon as SS officer Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz) steps out of his shiny Mercedes to walk onto a French peasant farm in his slick uniform, following up on a tip that Jews are hiding out there.

Meeting the landowner, Landa immediately turns on a hypnotic charm. Since the actor, Waltz, is equally fluent in the intricate word melodies of German, French, English and Italian - to say nothing of his own pleasant Viennese-Austrian accent - his character can disarm his opponent without his even reaching for the gun on his belt. Moreover, Landa enjoys his job. Once Landa has bagged his prey, the Tarantino stuff kicks in with all the morbid killing tricks that a rabid Nazi true-believer could think up. And, of course, at the end of this long, winding story of hide-and-seek, everyone is dead.

The make-believe heroes in the fairytale are a group of Jewish-American soldiers called "The Basterds." A parallel corps to Nazi Jew Hunters, they have banded together under the leadership of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), alias "Aldo the Apache," of the U.S. Special Forces. Wearing a hillbilly grin and sputtering a Tennessee accent, Aldo the Apache has chosen his own brand of resistance to spread fear throughout the Third Reich, beating heads to a pulp with baseball bats, taking scalps and otherwise brutally killing Nazis.

Tarantino adds a touch of romance when The Basterds visit a movie theater in Paris, where popular German hits are programmed for German and French audiences alike. The proprietor is a young, French-Jewish, teenage girl named Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), whose illegal papers can protect her for the moment from the suspecting Nazi authorities. She also has a yen for German sniper Frederic Zoller (Daniel Bruhl - another multi-lingual German actor, who lives in Paris).

Comic relief is supplied by Sylvester Groth as a baggy-pants Goebbels, Martin Wuttke as a vacant-eyed Adolf Hitler, and an assortment of well-known German actors and personalities in supporting roles. With this phalanx of names, "Inglourious Basterds" is guaranteed a solid run at the German and European box office. How the international jury at Cannes will decide is something else again. Cannes is auteur territory, not a freak show.

Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures

See photos of "Inglourious Basterds" at Cannes 2009.