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Inglourious Basterds – 4K

by Glenn Erickson Jan 07, 2025

It’s one of Tarantino’s best: Arrow Video repackages his celebration of absurd wartime action thrillers with a battery of new featurettes and interviews. We take the opportunity to revise a review that still gets mail. Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender and Diane Kruger star in a genre wish-fulfillment fantasy that could be called ‘Once Upon a Time in World War II.’


Inglourious Basterds 4K
4K Ultra-HD
Arrow Video
2009 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 153 min. / Street Date January 14, 2025 / Available from Arrow Video / 59.99
Starring: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, Gedeon Burkhard, Jacky Ido, Rod Taylor, Mike Myers.
Cinematography: Robert Richardson
Production Designer: David Wasco
Supervising Art Director: Sebastian T. Krawinkel
Costume Design: Anna B. Sheppard
Film Editor: Sally Menke
Produced by Lawrence Bender
Written and Directed by
Quentin Tarantino

Inglourious Basterds is back in 4K UHD, this time with new interviews, visual essays and text pieces that draw a critical bead on Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 hit. We’ve responded by revisiting our earlier coverage. The show was greeted with accolades but also harsh criticism for what reviewers found as mindless violence. Our take was that the film disassembles the popular ‘nostalgic WWII escapist combat fantasy,’ exaggerating the absurdities but improving on the dramatics.

Inglourious Basterds still holds up. It digs deep into the appeal of combat movies that treat war as a sports competition, where Our Side would never commit the Other Side’s terrible war crimes. In the process, Tarantino juggles film grammar almost as might Jean-Luc Godard. It was his best work since 1997’s  Jackie Brown, topped only by the sublime  Once Upon at Time in Hollywood.

The eccentricities begin right at the start with a main title sequence that’s a hodge-podge of type styles and music cues. Why are we hearing a soundtrack selection from John Wayne’s The Alamo?  Tarantino is critiquing a subgenre that’s usually packed with anachronisms and non-sequiturs. The first scene up is one of the filmmaker’s most intense dialogue exchanges, patterned after the opening of Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Right off the top, the movie is playing for keeps.

The show relies on great movie scenes that build tension, explore characters and clarify a complex storyline. New chapters veer off in new stylistic directions, often with new characters. There are no more than ten or so major scenes, almost like a Hollywood picture from the 1930s; the ratio between dialogue and action is also much more traditional. But fan-boys expecting wall-to-wall slaughter won’t be frustrated.

 

Tarantino both celebrates and dismantles the escapist war movies that reshaped wartime combat stories into exciting ‘fun’ entertainment. The big changeover came with 1961’s impossible mission yarn  The Guns of Navarone. The drama and suspense were now lightened by humor — and a relaxed attitude toward human life. Ordinary German foot soldiers were fair game and died in great numbers, anonymously. Nazis replaced wild Indians as all-purpose expendable bad guys, onto which the moviegoer could project his personal aggression. But the viewer could still feel self-righteously smug: macho heroism triumphs and all turns out okay for our side.

Inglourious Basterds embraces, analyzes and transcends the escapist war adventure all in one go. It’s about War: war as propaganda, war in the movies, and our love affair with war movie violence. Movies, film culture, and the Power of Cinema are central to its violent fantasy.

“That’s a Bingo!”

SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) is one of the top ten best-written villains ever. He’s as smart as Alexander Granach’s clever Nazi detective Gruber in Fritz Lang’s  Hangmen Also Die, only far more deadly. Landa dominates every scene, taking great pleasure in inflicting instant mental torture. His air of courtesy toward farmer LaPadite (Denis Menochet) is a mask to confuse and intimidate; soldiers with machine guns are never far away. The jarring episode establishes Landa’s pride in his identity as ‘The Jew Hunter.’  Exploitation movie law states “Thou shall keep all violence on-screen”, but Tarantino cuts things short before we know the fate of LaPadite and his daughters, leaving us in a state of unresolved tension.

 

“We in the killin’ Nazis bizness. An’ cousin, bizness is boomin”!”

The entrance of The Basterds pitches Inglourious back into the cheap seats. Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is in farce mode as he delivers a  Patton– like pep talk to his handpicked squad of Jewish G.I.’s. The setup is pure  Dirty Dozen, with allusions to a healthy, All-American Indian massacre mentality. Raine’s neck scar reminds us of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah characters that carry reminders of rope burns and scalping attempts. The scalping idea is the basis of The Basterds’ hold on the enemy imagination. It even gives Der Führer nightmares. Tarantino’s Grindhouse fans get their dose of bloody carnage.

The gross scalpings and other (petty?) atrocities carry weight because Raine’s brutal guerilla methods are how most real in-country combat is fought. Our TV news still reports as if warfare has rules, when up-close fighting has always been outright savagery unfit for home consumption. Sending enemy soldiers back with Swastikas carved in their foreheads is barbarity made poetic. Aldo Raine’s way of sending messages to the enemy points toward real Apache terror as portrayed in  Major Dundee and  Ulzana’s Raid. As Raine says, he didn’t parachute into hostile territory to teach the enemy good manners. Bizness is boomin”!

War movies have always re-interpreted combat for new generations. Vintage war stories avoided ethnic complications via the ‘melting pot’ convention: a platoon would contain a cowboy, a Jew, an Italian-American, etc.. Inglourious ignores all that to fixate on the issue of Jewish revenge. The Basterds’ comrade-in-arms, whom they’ll never meet, is Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), the only surviving member of her family after one of Hans Landa’s murder raids.

Tarantino uses his instant flashback sidebar technique to fill us in on the career of Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), a Wehrmacht renegade fighting for the Basterds. He’ll later use the same technique to explain the explosive nature of nitrate film, through a film clip from an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

With the entrance of Adolph Hitler (Martin Wuttke) we arrive at the complaint that Inglourious Basterds is a swamp of falsehoods and anachronisms. Duh!  That’s the whole point of the show. With few exceptions, war movies after 1955 or so always impose revisionist attitudes, music and style onto spectacular bloody combat. Stirring symphonic Sousa marches and service anthems were not heard at Wake Island or Bataan. The escapist war comedy  Kelly’s Heroes injects hippies and Spaghetti western jokes into its comic mix. Inglourious Basterds gets much wilder, but its fantasy never misrepresents the character of the participants. Aldo’s extreme backwoods twang jolts, but is not really exaggerated. When we hear source music it’s always from the period; Tarantino’s eclectic music cues are imposed from the outside. Morricone’s The Battle of Algiers theme establishes The Basterds as guerilla pros, while Afro-French film projectionist Marcel (Jacky Ido) prepares his firebomb to an Elmer Bernstein cue from  Zulu Dawn.

 

Once again, Tarantino manages to make a film far greater than the sum of its borrowed cinematic parts. His movie-score music cues are more than downloads from a fave mix list. A stylish montage shows a fatal lady-in-red preparing her makeup as if it were Apache war-paint. The accompanying track reverberates with a David Bowie song. What sounds like an unlikely audio choice for a scene happening in 1944 comes off as inspired. It’s no more inappropriate than the scat jazz vocals heard in Butch Cassidy in the Sundance Kid. Both work in context.

The obligatory scene in escapist war movies is when the hero is told that his particular suicide mission will end or shorten the war. Inglourious Basterds goes goofball with a high-level briefing. General Fenech (Mike Myers) doesn’t exactly play his phony Brit in Austin Powers mode, but with Winston Churchill (Rod Taylor) a casual participant we’re reminded how ridiculous (and exposition-laden) these scenes are. Lt. Archie Hickox (Michael Fassbinder) is a film critic-turned commando leader. He tosses off anachronistic references to subtextual meanings in German cinema, and uses movie titles as punch lines: Paris When It Sizzles. It’s our films versus their films — this is war!

A scene in a basement bistro is another Tarantino masterpiece-in-miniature that generates suspense the old-fashioned way. Archie finds himself in a Parisian pub full of Germans, with Deutsche movie star / double agent Bridgit von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). On its face, the situation is as ridiculous as any WW2 espionage fantasy in which glamorous spies hoodwink the Nazis over cocktails. Halfway through the proceedings, SS investigator Dieter Hellstrom (August Diehl) arrives, ratcheting up the dramatic tension.

The  scene reminds us strongly of 1968’s  Where Eagles Dare, another key escapist war fantasy involving an absurd commando mission. An SS menace played by Derren Nesbitt also interrupts a table gathering of Nazis and spies (Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood). It’s very much a Quentin Tarantino setup, and it received applause in theaters. The audience for Where Eagles Dare didn’t expect anything so sophisticated.

 

Then there’s the big movie premiere in Paris. Aldo Raine attends in a white tuxedo, a broad jibe at preposterous impersonation scenes. Smirking like a hick, imitating Cary Grant, Aldo would be spotted by a blind man, a dead blind man. It’s ridiculous yet we’ve seen it a million times, as when Charles Bronson disguised himself as a Nazi officer for Robert Aldrich. The rest of the big premiere scene is rigorously realistic, but it doesn’t matter . . . Tarantino generates tension with his clash of discordant elements.

The premiere brings together Tarantino’s main strategy, to compare historical reality against glorified movie-version reality. Venal Nazi opportunist Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) has made himself into a movie mogul in the Hollywood mold. The premiere is for the Reich’s latest propaganda film Nation’s Pride, which has an uncomfortably American feel. Wehrmacht sniper hero Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl) shoots hundreds of Americans from atop an Italian tower, much like our own Texan madman  Charles Whitman. Zoller’s exploit has made him a star with a political future. They call him the German Sergeant York, even though that film wouldn’t have played in German- occupied territories until after the war. York equated the German soldiers in his gunsight with turkeys, and Nation’s Pride shows American bodies piling up in absurd numbers — a reversal on the kind of ‘fun’ spectacle that Germans (and Mexicans, and Japanese, and American Indians) have always had to watch in American movies.

Freddie Zoller’s real historical counterpart is Audie Murphy, our Medal of Honor recipient personally credited with 240 German kills. Murphy soon became a popular movie star. The American equivalent to ‘Nation’s Pride’ is 1955’s  To Hell and Back. Murphy was a godsend for U.S. armed forces recruitment . War movies are an irreplaceable PR factor for the hero-making industry that keeps war recruits coming.

When Hitler joins the premiere guest list Shoshanna Dreyfus and The Basterds commence the Ultimate Vengeance Trip. Never mind that Hitler visited Paris only once, for about an hour. By late 1944 he was a paranoid drug addict, mostly locked away in bunkers. The combined Basterds / Shoshanna counterstrike against Nazidom fulfills the fantasy of every schoolboy of my generation, Jewish or not: — to kill Hitler.  Always give the audience what they want . . .

 

Hitler can be overthrown by the power of KINO!
 

Liberal moviemaking has a pitiful record as a tool for social change, but Shoshanna’s ‘experimental’ film really makes its point . . . aided by a giant nitrate cellulose bomb. Forget 3D: the movie screen lashes out to strike back at tyranny, like an Angel with a flaming sword. The conflagration dwarfs The Dirty Dozen’s incineration of a paltry few generals. Tarantino’s picture assembles his eclectic scraps of pulp culture into cinematic wish fulfillment — film conquers Evil.

Yes, a pop movie subgenre wins the war and saves the world. One would think that Inglourious Basterds was inspired by filmmaker Guy Maddin. Tarantino’s feminine avenger conquers Nazi Germany in a movie theater, with subversive filmmaking and the power of editing. A projection changeover becomes a major suspense device.

The Nazis’ own propaganda film immolates them for their sins, while Jewish-American guerillas blast the main villains into hamburger. All that’s left for Aldo Raine is the issue of double-dealing Nazis, the ones that bartered cozy deals with the Allied Command. The bloodsoaked fantasy ends with a neat and tidy comeuppance.

All this and economy too: Inglourious Basterds looks several times more expensive than it is. The movie doesn’t require that many sets. The premiere scene is fairly lavish but there are no large army battles to stage. The real work has gone into the casting, which collects a fresh array of interesting talent and arresting faces. German-language TV star Christoph Waltz totally deserved his Supporting Actor Oscar. He’s only the top name in a list of terrific talent: Mélanie Laurent, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Sylvester Groth.

Tarantino is also to be applauded for respecting his audience. He doesn’t withhold information and then leave us to figure things out. Viewers that might not recognize Emmanuelle as being Shoshanna from the first scene are given a quick identifier title. He even makes fun of the process, identifying Hermann Goering and Martin Bormann with hand-scratched pointers . . . why waste time with standard, lumpy exposition?  Quentin Tarantino’s glourious mission succeeds — his exploitation war movie stands up as superior world-class cinema.

 


 

Arrow Video’s 4K Ultra-HD of Inglourious Basterds 4K is most likely the same transfer as Universal’s 4K – Blu-ray combo release from three years ago, if only because it is not touted as new. Arrow’s encoding may be slightly different, something readers will need to learn about on a disc page that makes prioritizes bit rate comparisons.

Arrow doesn’t do combo discs; if you want the edition on Blu-ray you’ll have to spring for the label’s alternate  limited edition BD package. Either product makes an attractive gift item. Pulling off the outer sleeve reveals an ‘Operation Kino’ War Office dossier box. Inside that is a keep case with the discs, but also an insert booklet designed like a vintage English cinema publication. Tucked inside as well are a double-sided poster and a novelty Beer Coaster.

The keep case contains the 4K Ultra HD feature, the Blu-ray with the extras, and the other novelty items listed below. Our favorite is a card with a full recipe for making Strudel. Who doesn’t love a baker?

Universal’s original added value items are present, but Arrow adds a tall stack of new items. With the feature and therefore on the 4K disc alone is an audio commentary by Tim Lucas. His tracks have now ranged far afield from his former specialization of horror. He compresses a huge amount of factual information, starting right with the opening music track, taken directly from a slightly scratchy LP in Tarantino’s music collection. The track is so dense with factoids and analysis that we can tell he’s had to edit out gaps to have room to say all he has to say.

The new featurettes have a ‘direct testimony’ appeal that some of Universal’s official pub material does not. The interviewees talk about their work but also add their personal praise for Tarantino. Editor Fred Raskin’s piece hits a lot of points while extolling the work and personality of editor Sally Menke, who died in 2010; Inglourious was her final feature.

Makeup effects company owner Greg Nicotero likewise tries to offer a glimpse inside Tarantino’s creative domain. He gives us a full rundown on the philosophy of scalping scenes — how gory?  How graphic? Actor Omar Doom offers a simple endorsement of the director, and starts by stating that having appeared in a Tarantino picture is an honor that never goes away.

Three critical pieces are included.  Walter Chaw uses his 22 minutes for a filmic overview, focusing on elements of Tarantino’s movies that express kindness over violence. Pamela Hutchinson’s 20 minutes elaborate on Tarantino’s endless film history references. She touches on the same ‘Kino conquers’ theme when discussing the movie premiere conflagration, explaining the volatility of nitrate film, etc..

Christine Leteux’s piece Filmmaking in Occupied France is an in-depth presentation of what happened to the French film industry during the Occupation. We learn that French filmmakers employed by Nazi-controlled companies can’t be labeled as collaborators, at least not collectively. It is really a radio show — there are no research-oriented graphics. The video background is mostly inconsequential, just more random scenes from the Tarantino picture.

Rummaging through the other goodies, we settled on the 60-page insert book, most of which is dedicated to Dennis Cozzalio and Bill Ryan’s extended essay, Revenge of the Giant Face. It’s self-described as more of a conversation discussing aspects of the film. An archive for Cozzalio’s podcast Fear of the Velvet Curtain is at  Trailers from Hell.

Hey, the theme playing on Arrow’s menu is the Morricone march from  Allonsanfan!

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson


Inglourious Basterds 4K
4K Ultra-HD rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
New Supplements:
Audio commentary by Tim Lucas
Interview What Would Sally Do? with editor Fred Raskin
Interview Blood Fiction with special make-up effects supervisor Greg Nicotero
Interview Doomstruck with actor Omar Doom
Interview Filmmaking in Occupied France with Christine Leteux, author of  Continental Films: French Cinema Under German Control
Visual essay Making it Right by Walter Chaw
Visual essay Film History on Fire by Pamela Hutchinson
Extended and alternate scenes
Nation’s Pride
Archival Featurettes:
The Making of Nation’s Pride
Roundtable Discussion with Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt and Elvis Mitchell
The Original Inglorious Bastards
A Conversation with Rod Taylor
Rod Taylor on Victoria Bitter
Quentin Tarantino’s Camera Angel
Hi Sallys
Film Poster Gallery Tour with Elvis Mitchell
Trailers
60-page book with writing by film critics Dennis Cozzalio and Bill Ryan
Extras:
Double-sided fold-out poster
Replica Nation’s Pride Premiere programme booklet
La Louisianne beermat
3 postcard sized double-sided art cards
Strudel recipe card.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra-HD in Keep case
Reviewed:
January 5, 2025
(7255bast)
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Text © Copyright 2025 Glenn Erickson

About Glenn Erickson

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Glenn Erickson left a small town for UCLA film school, where his spooky student movie about a haunted window landed him a job on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS effects crew. He’s a writer and a film editor experienced in features, TV commercials, Cannon movie trailers, special montages and disc docus. But he’s most proud of finding the lost ending for a famous film noir, that few people knew was missing. Glenn is grateful for Trailers From Hell’s generous offer of a guest reviewing haven for CineSavant.

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Jenny Agutter fan

In an interview, Tarantino called the movie an analysis of how we define terrorism. The Basterds’ actions look like terrorism, but we root for them, because how can we not root for Jews to slaughter Nazis?

A few months after watching it, I saw the Italian movie whose title inspired it.

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