The classic war movie that inspired Quentin Tarantino: “It was the starting off point”
Few filmmakers can command a true genre pivot and move from a western-inspired mystery to a martial arts revenge story via a crime-comedy combo while remaining distinct in their style and storytelling language. Quentin Tarantino is one of those filmmakers.
When it came time for him to take a run at a war film, the result was the bombastic, tension-filled, and gripping Inglorious Basterds, the opening of which is not only a masterclass in dialogue but a manifesto of why Christoph Waltz is one of the best character actors working today.
War films aren’t a rarity in many directors’ works. Some of the greatest living (and dead) auteurs have tried their hand at telling a story within the most harrowing of human experiences. From Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket to more modern fare like Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk or Same Mendes’ film-long long-take 1917, the genre is stacked with inspirational, visionary works.
Tarantino’s influence on his foray into the war flick? He explained: “When I first sat down to write the movie, I thought I was going to write my Dirty Dozen – it didn’t work out that way, but that’s what got me to sit down.” It’s clear that there’s more than homage at play in Tarantino’s 2009 film starring Brad Pitt as the head of an OSS operation to take down high-ranking Nazi officials inside the Third Reich. Both Inglorious Basterds and Dirty Dozen ostensibly follow the same premise: a group of soldiers, all willing to die for a mission that could help bring a significant blow to the Axis during perhaps the most significant historical event in the 20th century.
In his usual, unique approach, however, Tarantino’s film ends the war in a suitably explosive and gory fashion and is completely historically inaccurate. While Dirty Dozen is a fictional portrayal of a unit of American soldiers (according to sources, around 30% accurate in its storytelling), it does not bring about an early end to the war due to its protagonist’s exploits.
“It was the starting off point, and then I kind of go off on my own way,” the director said of Dirty Dozen and how his film relates.
The parallels are more than just overarching story beats; the ‘Filthy 13’, the historical inspiration for the 1967 film, had a leader named Jake McNeice, who was one-quarter Choctaw, a group of Native American people, and sure to be the reason behind Pitt’s Aldo Raine’s own heritage in Inglorious Basterds. This homaging not only to Dirty Dozen but the story behind the film is a testament to how long Tarantino spent working on his version of the tall tale, with reports that the story for Basterds was worked on for over a decade. Tarantino is quoted saying that he became “too precious about the page”, and the story kept growing, viewing the film as his masterpiece and his “bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission” movie à la Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare.
This level of work spent on Inglorious Basterds can only speak to a real reverence of the film that so directly inspired it, and considering the longevity that the movie has been able to achieve, time well spent.
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