The two actors Quentin Tarantino calls “a different breed”
The ‘men on a mission’ movie is a cinematic archetype that’s been done to death across countless genres, but Quentin Tarantino was always guaranteed to put his own distinctive spin on the formula when he assembled a ragtag group of heroes for a death-defying jaunt behind enemy lines.
The end result was Inglourious Basterds, which found the filmmaker rewriting the history books by having the titular guerrilla unit machine gun the Nazi hierarchy to death and leave their bodies to burn in the smouldering wreckage of a flaming cinema, which certainly set it apart from the pack.
Tarantino has always been celebratory of cinema’s classic movie stars, and he cast Brad Pitt in the lead role of Aldo Raine partially because he believes the A-lister exudes the same sort of qualities his favourite actors had in spades in decades past. On the other hand, he doesn’t think there are too many modern performers cut from a similar cloth.
The writer and director was hardly shy in anointing Inglourious Basterds as his take on The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare, or The Guns of Navarone, which besides being three classic ‘men on a mission’ flicks released in the 1960s, all feature an eclectic ensemble cast of established stars and grizzled character actors who inject their respective roles with grace, gravitas, and no small amount of badassery.
From his perspective, though, trying to replicate Robert Aldrich’s 1967 war epic with the tools 21st century Hollywood currently has at its disposal simply wouldn’t work. In fact, Tarantino was adamant that The Dirty Dozen would be impossible to recreate in the modern era, because the industry doesn’t have the same calibre of hard-nosed thespian.
“We just don’t have those kinds of actors anymore,” he lamented to The Guardian. “Ernest Borgnine. Charles Bronson. Those guys were real men. They were a different breed. Many of them had been to war. Today’s young actors are soft.”
Although it’s definitely a good thing the overwhelming majority of professional actors working today haven’t experienced combat first-hand because it means the world hasn’t devolved into all-out conflict for a third time, it’s clear that Tarantino believes the talent pool isn’t quite deep enough for the business to even try and recapture the magic of The Dirty Dozen beat-for-beat.
In addition to Borgnine and Bronson, the cast also boasts Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland, and George Kennedy among others, all of whom fit Tarantino’s billing of being among the manliest men to have ever manned up and done man stuff on the silver screen.
It’s not exactly flattering to refer to an entire generation of actors as being inferior to those who came before, but Tarantino nonetheless did a pretty great job with the “soft” tools he was given to work with.
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