Hitler to get Pulp Fiction treatment in Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards
(Paul Buck/EPA)
Tarantino, in Germany this week, has cast Brad Pitt in the film
Roger Boyes, Berlin Quentin Tarantino, master of cinematic violence, is about to stir up a hornet's nest in Germany with a war film that depicts Nazi soldiers having their brains bashed out with a baseball bat wielded by a vengeful American.
And far worse. Even by the stomach-curdling standards of the US director-maker of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs the new film is a veritable blood bath.
Filming starts in Berlin on October 13 and the controversial director is already in the German capital making his final casting decisions. The star role is to be played by Brad Pitt. His character, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, leads a group of American Jewish soldiers who are dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe to wreak revenge on the Germans and destroy their morale.
The tone of the film, provisionally entitled Inglorious Bastards, is set early on by Lieutenant Raine in a pep speech to his men. According to a leaked version of the script, the officer says: "Every man under my command, owes me, one hundred Nazi scalps ... and all y'all will git me one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis or you will die trying."
Not so much Kill Bill then, as Kill Adolf.
But it is not just the scalping, or the carving of swastikas in foreheads, or the shooting of a German officer's testicles, or the slow strangling scene — all shown with Tarantino's customary love of detail — that is likely to upset the nation and its critics.
It is the whole idea of turning the Second World war into a kind of comic book adventure in which not a single German character has redeeming value.
Judging by the leaked Tarantino script, the only good German is a dead one (with the suspense concentrated on the modalities of how he should die). For modern Germany that represents a regression to the days of the crudest anti-German war propaganda.
"This is Pop Culture encountering Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with unprecedented force," says Tobias Kniebe, film critic of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, "and the effects of this collision are utterly unpredictable."
For 60 years German film-makers have used war films as a pedagogic device to show how good Germans should have reacted to the Nazi terror.
There has been anguished debate about whether Hollywood should be allowed to make a film about Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the man who tried unsuccessfully to blow up Hitler and the closest the country has to a war hero. The film, starring Tom Cruise, has yet to be screened but Germany's critics have been sharpening their pens, ready to knock it when it eventually sees the light of day.
The Tarantino film though is more likely to give German critics cardiac arrest rather than the perverse pleasure of writing a bad review.
"All the German historians and critics who were left gasping for breath by Tom Cruise and his worthy attempts to produce a correct image of Stauffenberg — they will be so shocked by Inglorious Bastards that they will savage it on the spot, " says Mr Kniebe. "And perhaps that is precisely [Tarantino's] plan."
In fact, the director is stressing that the film will not really be about war at all, still less about Germany.
"I don't want it to feel like a period film," said Mr Tarantino in an interview before coming to Berlin. "This is a modern, in-your-face movie."
The film appears to follow in the tradition of The Dirty Dozen — the 1967 work starring Lee Marvin which debunked the standard cinematic American war hero by sending hardened, unbalanced convicts on a suicide mission.
There is more than a nod, too, in the direction of a 1978 Italian film, also called Inglorious Bastards, which features anarchic gun-happy deserters in German-occupied France. But if the leaked script bears any resemblance to the final product — he wants the film ready for the Cannes Festival next year — this will be pure Tarantino, right down to the brain tissue splattered on the walls.
And it certainly does not have historical pretensions. The final scene (without revealing too much detail) has Hitler trapped in an exploding cinema, the violence on the screen being matched by the violent death of the audience. The director's note on that scene makes plain what awaits the cinema audience both in the film and in real life. "The auditorium is a literal red rain of legs, arms, heads, torsos, and asses."
Vintage Tarantino then. But a movie, one suspects, unlikely to enthral German audiences.
Hitler to get Pulp Fiction treatment in Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards
(Paul Buck/EPA)
Tarantino, in Germany this week, has cast Brad Pitt in the film
Roger Boyes, BerlinQuentin Tarantino, master of cinematic violence, is about to stir up a hornet's nest in Germany with a war film that depicts Nazi soldiers having their brains bashed out with a baseball bat wielded by a vengeful American.
And far worse. Even by the stomach-curdling standards of the US director-maker of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs the new film is a veritable blood bath.
Filming starts in Berlin on October 13 and the controversial director is already in the German capital making his final casting decisions. The star role is to be played by Brad Pitt. His character, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, leads a group of American Jewish soldiers who are dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe to wreak revenge on the Germans and destroy their morale.
The tone of the film, provisionally entitled Inglorious Bastards, is set early on by Lieutenant Raine in a pep speech to his men. According to a leaked version of the script, the officer says: "Every man under my command, owes me, one hundred Nazi scalps ... and all y'all will git me one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis or you will die trying."
Not so much Kill Bill then, as Kill Adolf.
But it is not just the scalping, or the carving of swastikas in foreheads, or the shooting of a German officer's testicles, or the slow strangling scene — all shown with Tarantino's customary love of detail — that is likely to upset the nation and its critics.
It is the whole idea of turning the Second World war into a kind of comic book adventure in which not a single German character has redeeming value.
Judging by the leaked Tarantino script, the only good German is a dead one (with the suspense concentrated on the modalities of how he should die). For modern Germany that represents a regression to the days of the crudest anti-German war propaganda.
"This is Pop Culture encountering Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with unprecedented force," says Tobias Kniebe, film critic of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, "and the effects of this collision are utterly unpredictable."
For 60 years German film-makers have used war films as a pedagogic device to show how good Germans should have reacted to the Nazi terror.
There has been anguished debate about whether Hollywood should be allowed to make a film about Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the man who tried unsuccessfully to blow up Hitler and the closest the country has to a war hero. The film, starring Tom Cruise, has yet to be screened but Germany's critics have been sharpening their pens, ready to knock it when it eventually sees the light of day.
The Tarantino film though is more likely to give German critics cardiac arrest rather than the perverse pleasure of writing a bad review.
"All the German historians and critics who were left gasping for breath by Tom Cruise and his worthy attempts to produce a correct image of Stauffenberg — they will be so shocked by Inglorious Bastards that they will savage it on the spot, " says Mr Kniebe. "And perhaps that is precisely [Tarantino's] plan."
In fact, the director is stressing that the film will not really be about war at all, still less about Germany.
"I don't want it to feel like a period film," said Mr Tarantino in an interview before coming to Berlin. "This is a modern, in-your-face movie."
The film appears to follow in the tradition of The Dirty Dozen — the 1967 work starring Lee Marvin which debunked the standard cinematic American war hero by sending hardened, unbalanced convicts on a suicide mission.
There is more than a nod, too, in the direction of a 1978 Italian film, also called Inglorious Bastards, which features anarchic gun-happy deserters in German-occupied France. But if the leaked script bears any resemblance to the final product — he wants the film ready for the Cannes Festival next year — this will be pure Tarantino, right down to the brain tissue splattered on the walls.
And it certainly does not have historical pretensions. The final scene (without revealing too much detail) has Hitler trapped in an exploding cinema, the violence on the screen being matched by the violent death of the audience. The director's note on that scene makes plain what awaits the cinema audience both in the film and in real life. "The auditorium is a literal red rain of legs, arms, heads, torsos, and asses."
Vintage Tarantino then. But a movie, one suspects, unlikely to enthral German audiences.