Inglourious Basterds
By Alvaro André Zeini Cruz
Throughout the showing of Inglourious Basterds, another film kept coming to mind. No, I’m not referring to the already much-commented references that Quentin Tarantino makes to Serge Leone, nor to Brian De Palma in his new film, but to a classic directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Ray Milland and Grace Kelly in the mid 50’s. As I watched Inglourious Basterds, Dial M for Murder would not leave my head.
It was, in the least, intriguing that I should make this almost bizarre association between two films that apparently have little in common, made by somewhat disparate directors, as Hitchcock was a master of classic illusionism, whilst Tarantino is an ironic and less than discreet commentator on cinema. After all, at what point were these two works connected? Where, how, when or why did Tarantino’s peculiar war film touch upon (in my head) Hitchcock’s murder thriller? Such questions were only answered when I stopped thinking of Inglourious Basterds as a whole in order to, at last, analyse the narrative from its beginning, in the same way as it is presented to us from the start: in the form of chapters or episodes.
It has been a while since I last saw Dial M for Murder, but here goes: there was a meeting of two parties (old school friends) and from this meeting a game, blackmail, developed from an intrigue, all strongly connected to the dialogue and limited to the setting of an apartment living-room. Think now about the prologue of Inglourious Basterds, in the scene that makes reference to Leone: on the horizon, appears the enemy who is opposed to the family in their apparent normality. The enemy is invited to enter the house and a false game of cordiality between the two sides is established. From this meeting arises the intrigue and both sides try to prove their “theses”, thus creating a feeling of dubiety in the spectator: After all, who is the strongest character in the clash: LaPadite the farmer, or Colonel Hans Landa? This game is prolonged to limit where one of these two characters gives in to the psychological pressure and “falls”: this is the cue for violence to come into play and the chapter ends.
This pattern repeats itself throughout the film, and reappears as much at the moment in which Shoshanna is placed face-to-face with Landa, her family’s executioner, himself, as in the extremely long sequence set in a bar. In both scenes we have a repetition of the Hitchcockian situation from Dial M for Murder; two sides, intrigue, suspense, the strength of the dialogue, and finally, the space, as the delimiting element. In the latter scene, however, all this is strengthened, and if Hitchcock stated that he was capable of making a whole film within the tiny space of a telephone box, Tarantino does something along these lines in composing his “mise en scène” within a limited space, populated by a reasonable number of characters, divided into at least three different action foci (the two bar-tables and the cashier’s desk). It is, probably, the synthetic moment of Inglourious Basterds: a film that, like all Tarantino’s work, is extremely rooted to the image. Not only in the image, but in cinema itself (and not for nothing, cinema becomes the main weapon in Shoshanna’s revenge), and as cinema has been more than just an image for a long time, here we meet sound. The excessive chatter here is not a crutch; it coexists with the image and finds its own force, which corroborates in the prolongation, in the suspense, in the strengthening of the intrigue and the turning-points that are part of the thriller. Just as Hitchcock had done in Dial M for Murder (and so many other works). Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that there is one basic difference between the two films. Hitchcock considered Dial M for Murder a lesser film. Here Tarantino scores points, and justly, by the mouth of Brad Pitt’s character: Inglourious Basterds is definitively his masterpiece.
