AN "INGLOURIOUS" MOVIE

Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie, "Inglourious Basterds," is now playing at our North Shore Cinema.  My son invited me to see it with him and I accepted the invitation.  It was entertaining for its full 153 minutes, covering a time line from 1941 to 1944 during World War II. The locale was occupied France, after the German Army defeated the French and British, driving all organized resistance from western Europe.

Mr. Tarantino tells his story through a series of loosely related vignettes, centered around a group of Jewish-American soldier volunteers, led by Brad Pitt, who were inserted into occupied France to kill Nazis. While the stories are obviously fiction, as a student of military history, I found Mr. Tarantino playing loosely with the facts. Mr. Pitt, who assumes a corn pone accent as an Army Lieutenant leading the team, advocates killing Nazis without mercy and charges his team to each secure 100 scalps. While I have no sympathy with the Nazis of that era, their role in the German military was primarily in the Schutzstaffel (better known as the SS) which means in English, "Protective Echelon." Why then, does Pitt’s team zero in on the Wehrmacht Army personnel, mainly consisting of conscripted German youth who were not members of the Nazi Party? It made me cringe to watch a Wehrmacht Army Sergeant beaten to death with a baseball bat, because he refused to give up military information. I’ll venture that half of the audience who think water boarding is a venal sin, thought that beating a common German soldier to death with a baseball bat was okay. I thought if Pitt’s team wanted to kill Nazis, why didn’t they take on the Nazi SS? Where was Attorney General Eric Holder when we needed him?

Later, Mr. Tarantino introduces Dr. Joseph Goebbels, German Reichsminister of Propaganda, into the mix, identifying him as the number two man behind Hitler. Actually he was somewhere behind Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering and Reichfuhrer SS - Heinrich Himmler. Why Mr. Tarantino didn’t introduce Herr Doctor Goebbels correctly is a puzzle since it didn’t influence the plot in any way.

The final vignette in which Hitler, Goering and Goebbels are all consumed in a Paris theater fire unleashed by a Jewish woman whose family had been brutally killed in the first vignette brings the film to an exciting if fictional conclusion.

By far the best role as nasty SS Colonel Hans Landa is played by Austrian actor Christoph Waltz. His performance made Brad Pitt look like someone out of the high school senior play. His best actor award for the role at the Cannes Film Festival was well deserved. His work is worth the price of admission all by itself. So, don’t hesitate, go see the movie. It’s suitable for adults, but too bloody and violent for the younger generation.