‘Inglourious Basterds’ On Netflix: Investigating The Precedents For Quentin Tarantino’s Outrageous Alternate History of WWII

Full disclosure: I am one of the snowflakes who got a little queasy when I learned that the upcoming Quentin Tarantino movie, Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood would feature Charles Manson and company as components of its milieu and storyline.

I was a kid back when Manson and his minions carried out their ghastly murders, but I was an unusually cinephiliac 10-year-old who already knew about Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski before that fateful night in August of 1969. And I still remember how the news of these murders sent a wave of stomach-churning paranoia all the way from Laurel Canyon to Bergen County, New Jersey, where my kid self lived at the time. Woodstock was soon to follow, and then its catastrophic evil twin, Altamont. It was a time that was scary and exhilarating in equal measure for a while — and then, scary won. Decisively.

So while I could say the idea for the next QT movie gave me ethical qualms, and I wouldn’t be lying, my qualms were highly personalized. On the other hand, Tarantino is only a few years younger than me, and he was a kid cinephile himself — he’s got as much of a subjective/imaginative claim on the era as anyone. And I have to admit it — I wasn’t nearly as bothered by the way he messed around in World War II history in his 2009 epic Inglourious Basterds as I became prepared to be by Once Upon A Time…

Is that because I’m a hypocrite? Well, yes, kind of.

And we’ll get to that. But there’s more. If you haven’t seen Inglourious Basterds — which is a new addition to the Netflix catalog today, mere days before the U.S. theatrical debut of Once Upon A Time… — already, you might want to tread carefully here.

The plot, once the movie gets to the central nub of it, involves a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and most of his high command at a movie premiere in Paris in 1944. The movie resolves in a way that goes entirely contrary to the actual history of World War II and Germany’s defeat in that war. And it does so in a way that can only be called outrageous.

There’s a whole lot of historically inaccurate outrageousness in the movie besides that, from Brad Pitt’s Nazi-scalping American Colonel “Aldo Raine” (yeesh) to Michael Fassbender’s British-film-critic turned undercover Allied operative. Tarantino steeps the movie in nonsense without a care in the world. In part because he’s him, and he lives to take these wild flights. But also because he knows he’s got precedent. Reels and reels of it.

The movie’s title alone derives from a 1978 Italian-produced WWII B-movie called The Inglorious Bastards, starring Fred Williamson and featuring topless female Nazis with machine guns, a heretofore unknown factor of Axis fighting forces. Bastards was a very-late-in-the-day, thoroughly ridiculous knockoff of The Dirty Dozen, the 1967 action epic (it’s almost as long as Tarantino’s 153-minute picture) that did so well for producer-director Robert Aldrich that he was able to start his own movie studio with the profits. (The venture went bust pretty quickly, alas.) Both these pictures range pretty far from the realities of combat in the European Theater of Operations, to say the least.

Another tendril of precedent is that Hitler himself, in the years both prior to and after World War II, was a prominent figure of popular culture. A hateful one for the most part, but a genuine one. Several months before England declared war on Germany in 1939, for example, there was the publication of British author Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male, in which a British hunting gentleman aims a rifle at Hitler from a distance for the sport of determining if he can knock the guy off. This gets him in all kinds of trouble with the Germans. The best-seller was made into an American movie, Man Hunt, directed by Fritz Lang, a refugee from Nazi Germany. That picture was released in June of 1941, many months before Pearl Harbor drew America into the war.

During this period lurid Hollywood melodramas with titles such as Hitler’s Children and Hitler’s Madman (directed by Canadian-born Edward Dmytryk and German refugee Douglas Sirk respectively) hit theaters with the aim of roiling public sentiment against the dictator. And after the war, Z-movie speculative fictions like They Saved Hitler’s Brain raised more eyebrows than they raised genuinely outraged hackles.

On the comedy front, Mel Brooks’ inventive, outrageous 1967 The Producers had the immortal premise of a Hitler-based Broadway musical, executed by entrepreneurs hoping to embezzle a profit off the seemingly sure-fire bad-taste flop they overfunded. The song “Springtime For Hitler” is still a classic of what they used to call “sick humor” in the 1960s. Across the pond several years later, goose-stepping John Cleese and his fellow Monty Python members concocted a skit in which a suspicious-looking fellow going by the name “Adolph Hilter” runs for local office in an English election.

And alternate histories of WWII in film date from back when the war was in full force. The classic, still engrossing 1942 British thriller Went The Day Well?, directed by Albert Cavalcanti from a story by Graham Greene, is a nightmarish speculation of German ground forces infiltrating the British homeland. 1941’s Forty-Ninth Parallel has Nazi spies almost succeeding in the U.S. 1945’s Strange Holiday, an American production, allegorically posits a U.S. takeover by fascists.

The 1964 indie It Happened Here, co-directed by future film restoration guru Kevin Brownlow, has a “what-if?” story about the German occupation of Great Britain after a Nazi victory. The number of grindhouse pictures taking severe and lurid historical liberties — don’t get me started on Nazi Love Camp #27, which I witnessed as a hapless collegiate in a run-down bijou in Paterson, N.J. in the late ’70s — is impossible to nail down.

So while the extreme revisionism of Basterds did garner stray protests from earnest literalists whose upset should not be met with any return disapprobation, its sacrilege did not shake the earth. And, as time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future, and the culture grows more temporally removed, and hence, by nature, more numb to Manson’s crimes, he too gains stature (if that’s the right word) as a pop culture villain or ghoul. Given that no less an authority as Geraldo Rivera cited Manson as “today’s top Satanic celebrity” all the way back in the ’80s, I am behind the times in giving it up to Charlie in that respect. Such realizations, and, yes, the good reviews that greeted Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood after it premiere at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, now have me anticipating the movie more than dreading it.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream Inglourious Basterds