It’s been called “insanely OTT” with “tension ramped up to almost unbearable levels in a volley of standout scenes”. And it’s these very traits, along with its ability to “never once fail to surprise and entertain”, that have seen this World War Two film ranked among the 100 best films of all time.
In fact, only four war films rank above it in the list, put together by world-renowned film magazine Empire. Those films are Lawrence of Arabia, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List and Apocalypse Now.
The film in question is Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, which has a rating of 89% on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.4 out of 10 on IMDB. It stars Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Melanie Laurent and Diane Kruger. But it was an actor largely unknown at the time who stood out above all, sweeping the boards at stellar awards ceremonies after the film’s release.
Christoph Waltz won the Best Supporting Actor prize at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes and Baftas, to name just three, for his portrayal of Nazi SS officer Hans Landa. In fact, Tarantino said he might never had made the film if he had not “found someone as good as Christoph”. Critic Ed Koch, writing in The Atlantic, said Waltz’s performance is “the highlight of the film”.
The 2009 film tells the story of two converging plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler at a Paris cinema. One is by a British-led operation carried out by a team of American soldiers led by Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine, while the other is by the owner of the French cinema, Shosanna Dreyfuss (Laurent), in revenge for the murder of her family by Landa and his troops.
The film was Tarantino’s seventh as a director and his highest-grossing to that point, until it was surpassed by Django Unchained in 2012, which also starred Waltz alongside Jamie Foxx.
The film has received widespread praise from critics, whether professional or armchair. In 2019, ten years after its release, Caryn James wrote on the BBC that Inglorious Basterds was Tarantino’s “masterpiece” and “most perfectly realised work”. James wrote: “It is not as brashly startling as Reservoir Dogs, his first film, or as influential as the violent, funny, time-looping Pulp Fiction. But with its swoop through history, and its flawless ability to be at once a war movie and a homage to war movies, a comedy and a drama, Basterds is his most ambitious, most perfectly realised work.”
Geoffrey Macnab writing in The Independent said the film was Tarantino’s “most entertaining and exhilarating effort since Pulp Fiction” while Jonathan Crocker writing for Little White Lies said it was “his most purely enjoyable film since Kill Bill Volume 1”.
The misspelling in the title of the film is, of course, deliberate. The title is inspired by a 1978 Italian war film called The Inglorious Bastards that follows a group of prisoners drafted into a special war mission in 1944. But Tarantino hasn’t been entirely clear as to why he did that. He has given various explanations, including that “that’s just the way you say it”, that it was “Quentin Tarantino spelling” and that it was a “a Basquiat-esque touch” in reference to an artist who deliberately misspelled in his work.
Inglorious Basterds is available on Netflix with a subscription and on Amazon Prime Video, Google Play and Apple TV from £2.49.