Not be confused with Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, and there’s really no reason it should be, Inglorious Bastards (later rebranded as GI Bro) is a 1978 film directed by Enzo G. Castellari (Eagles Over London). This is an often ridiculous, low-budget movie; the characters are flat and under motivated. But it also has a sort of joy; it doesn’t take itself too seriously; it’s trying to be fun and funny, and it sometimes is.
Not that you should necessarily watch it, but you won’t hate yourself if you do–I mean that won’t be why you hate yourself. You might end up hating me for suggesting you watch a movie that is pretty dumb, but you might not. I’m sure you’re a very complex person, and I can’t accurately predict your behavior, but this movie isn’t important enough to get angry about. If you want to get angry about my views of Overlord or The Thin Red Line or Dunkirk or The Big Red One, that’s fine, I guess.
I mean, really, why would you get angry? They’re just movies, but Inglorious Bastards is far more clearly just a movie. It does not demand or even hope to be taken seriously.
There’s a germ of good story (some would say this story is The Dirty Dozen), but it generally doesn’t work because so many parts are flat or silly. All the characters are some sort of stereotype, or just people with names–not even stereotypes, and they certainly don’t grow or change—they just go from one scene or another and then either talk or shoot people (or get shot at) in that scene and move to the next one until half way through they stumble onto the story and participate in it because, well they don’t really have any reason, per se; they just do.
And then suddenly there are naked German women bathing in a stream! And they have machine guns! What’s their back story? Where’s their movie? This scene would be random except that it clearly exists so there can be naked women shooting machine guns, so it is the most clearly motivated scene in the film.
That is just one of a variety of situations they stumble into that includes getting captured while posing as prisoners to try to avoid capture–a trick that fails twice in the movie. Twice. Their first escape is an excellent example of everything that is wrong with the movie. Captured by the Germans? Don’t worry, Fred Williamson will cleverly drop some palettes on some Germans who don’t know how to react to the threat of wood falling near and perhaps on them—”should I step aside? Darn it; in retrospect it is clear I should have stepped aside.” This scene is also the official example of an Endless Clip.
It also an example of what’s good about the movie because it’s kind of fun and tongue in cheek. Williamson’s character throws a grenade and a German soldier is hoisted on a wire–I mean blown in the air by the grenade–and Williamson gives a little “good for me” smile that’s a little bit fun; he’s a little bit charming throughout the film. This scene is a solid test for whether or not you will enjoy this film–if you found it kind of fun, you’ll enjoy this film. If you think it was nearly too stupid and unrealistic for words, you won’t.
In a later scene they break through a roadblock, and the guards politely wait their turns to be killed—sure they appear surprised that someone should be shooting at them during a war, but that won’t lead them to impose on our heroes by firing weapons or anything. I think you can see one actor struggling with the question: “how can I wait three more seconds before I even lift my gun?”
The film is an inverted pyramid of ridiculousness. Early on it is nearly completely ridiculous and stays that way for quite a while. Eventually they meet up with some partisans and some other things have happened, and though they are under motivated, what they are doing is less ridiculous.
The final battle, where they assault a train, a railroad station and a railroad bridge after joining forces with the partisans, is barely ridiculous at all—and sometimes exciting, though there are some comic moments. The Germans manage to kill people they shoot at–something they have been markedly unable to do to our heroes, partially because there are now people who are not named Williamson and Svenson fighting. There is also model work with trains crashing and exploding, some of which which is quite well done.
Williamson is generally too cool to use two hands to fire his sub-machine gun. It seems odd when he does use two hands. You wonder if he was he tired that day or something.
This final battle is far more realistic and far better than any other in the movie. The use of explosions, slow motion and the simple fact that Germans successfully shoot people make the scenes where our heroes join partisans in attacking a train the best action scenes in the movie by far, unless you prefer naked women firing MP 40s. Seriously–I want to know more about the bathing women with machine guns.
The train sequence is also certainly an homage to Sam Peckinpah and reminiscent of his work (this film was released only a year after Cross of Iron but well after The Wild Bunch), but Peckinpah is better at it. The brutal and gruesome, though perhaps also beautiful, deaths Peckinpah shows are just mainly slow-motion shots of guys falling down acrobatically or being pulled by wires in Inglorious Bastards. That sentence is meaner than I want it to be because some of the action in this film is pretty good—just not as good as it is in Cross of Iron or many other war films.
The final battle may be well done, or I have may have been suffering from sort of bad action Stockholm syndrome kind of thing; having become acclimated to the ridiculously unrealistic earlier scenes, I may be overrating the later scenes which are certainly stronger.
To say this film isn’t great is to unfairly suggest it is good. It has some charm and some good parts, but it has many other parts as well and some of them are not charming. This movie isn’t bad enough to watch as a hip exercise in irony, and it is far too uneven to be more than a curiosity.
Recommendation
Go on ahead and watch Inglorious Bastards or GI Bro–it’s fine.They’re both currently available on Tubi–though the print of GI Bro airing is substandard. If you think they’re great, we have some significant disagreement on what makes a movie great, but there are a metric ton of movies that are substantially less entertaining.