‘The Inglorious Bastards’ or — The Thrill of Total Forward Momentum?
Ask any fan of Enzo G. Castellari what’s the appeal of the director and their response will invariably be “pacing” because no other filmmaker in history made movies that blasted along at such a delirious rate of knots as this guy and his 1978 war flick ‘The Inglorious Bastards’ is a ridiculously entertaining example of that in action… so, so much action.
Castellari achieves this high level of energy with one simple trick — by having the bastards kill everybody and anybody they meet. This is because the bastards, a group of escaped American soldiers sentenced to death by their own army for war crimes they most certainly DID commit, are making their way across Nazi occupied France on their way to Switzerland. This, obviously, necessitates them having to violently gun down everyone they meet in a German uniform and, because their own military are also after them, sometimes in an American uniform too.
This somewhat lax approach to the Geneva Convention means it’s not long until the bastards get themselves into a bit of hot water, specifically when they accidentally shoot down a squad of their own men (oopsie!) who’ve been sent on a secret mission to steal the gyroscope from an experimental V2 rocket being transported on a heavily guarded train.
Feeling somewhat culpable for brutally killing their comrades the bastards decide the only decent and morally upstanding thing to do is to go on the mission themselves, steal the gyroscope and kill as many Germans as possible in an act of cleansing redemption.
So what we’re dealing with here is a blatant rip-off of ‘The Dirty Dozen’ (1967) except Castellari isn’t just satisfied with lifting from that so also plunders from every single other war movie ever made — insert every WW II film you can possibly think of in this space — along with James Bond (why is there a Polaris nuclear missile in this movie?) and the Spaghetti Western format for good measure.
Now you’d expect from all that that the film would be a complete mess but what’s surprising, if not downright shocking, is how well it all holds together once it’s been radically simplified and this stripped back plot allows Castellari to concentrate on nothing else than delivering highly effective mayhem.
A great example of this highly effective mayhem is when the bastards have a blow up a bridge (this is an Italian movie so of course they’re going to blow up a bridge at some point), something Castellari manages to pull off on a small budget by blowing it up by not blowing it up. It’s done like this — there’s a shot of a real bridge with some harmless pyrotechnics attached to it to sell the basic idea of a bridge in the process of exploding but, after that, it’s nothing more than a series of quick edits and clever camera placements to disguise the fact that we really haven’t seen the bridge being destroyed at all, even though we think we have. It’s an inspired way to not only cut costs and save time (god, producers must’ve loved this guy!) but, again, is evidence of just how fast Castellari keeps everything moving.
A good, if slightly unfair, way of illustrating just how much energy Castellari packs into his work is to compare ‘The Inglorious Bastards’ with another WW II film released the same year, Guy Hamilton’s ‘Force Ten from Navarone’ (1978), a lumbering, turgid, bland, listless, lethargic, enervation inducing bore. In contrast ‘Bastards’ contains (or, more precisely, is constructed of nothing but) everything ‘Force Ten’ is lacking: brio, vitality, zest and, most importantly, fun! (plus, unlike Tarantino’s namesake effort this film doesn’t get caught up going down narrative cul-de-sacs or caked in tedious self indulgence and is only concerned with the audience’s enjoyment levels as opposed to glorifying the director’s raging ego)
‘The Inglorious Bastards’ does for war films what the Italians had previously done to the Western — turn it into a comic-strip with spy movie influences, so if you’re looking for depth, meaning or ethical responsibility you could find this a reprehensible, empty, infantile piece of nonsense. If, however, you’re looking to be left bouncing up and down in excitement then ‘The Inglorious Bastards’ could just give you everything your heart desires. See, they’re not quite such a bunch of total bastards after all!
