The greatest element — that’s a bold claim, considering the hot competition among the movie’s other collaborators. But in hindsight, few would argue that the marvelous sets, vehicles, and spy gadgets of Goldfinger, masterminded by production designer Ken Adam, are any less iconic than Ian Fleming’s novel, Sean Connery’s performance, or John Barry’s musical score.

Production design is a largely unsung art. Both the script and the need for historical accuracy tend to serve as harsh governors on the dreams and fantasies of the people charged with designing a movie’s sets and props. But the Bond films, Adam says, “are done so loosely that the script isn’t the Bible that it is in most films. It changes all the time, and the whole process of writing is like some democratic debating society.”

When Dr. No went into production in 1961, Adam got a mere 14,000 pounds (out of the movie’s total budget of 350,000) with which to design all of the interior sets for this “tongue-in-cheek spectacular,” including the casino in the opening scene, Bond’s apartments, M’s office, and the sprawling, futuristic lair of the villainous doctor himself. He performed his task in England while the rest of the cast and crew were off filming exteriors in Jamaica, and when they returned they were stunned by what they saw:

Adam, originally a German who fled to England with his family before the War, called on his love of German Expressionism to invent outrageous sets that were, as he called them, “theatrical realism. . . exaggerated practicality. . . hyper-reality by design.” Larger-than-life, yes, but still of life, much like Fleming’s novels themselves. “Nobody could foresee the success of Dr. No,” Adams insists. “What happened was like magic, almost.”

Two years later Adam arrived on the set of his second Bond film, Goldfinger, with a budget many times that of his previous effort. His first task this time out was designing the new car Bond was to use. He settled on the Aston Martin DB5 because, “It was sort of the most prestigious British sports car at the time. We couldn’t have used a Ferrari or something like that, you know.”

An admitted “sports-car freak,” Adam went nuts pimping out Bond’s ride with its now-legendary array of special options, using the rationale that “all the gimmickry and gadgets were just what I would have wanted in my own car.” The entire crew was encouraged to submit their own ideas for upgrades, and by the time he was finished he had spent 25,000 pounds — almost double the total production design budget of Dr. No — on the Aston Martin alone. As it happened the vehicle was only on screen for thirteen minutes, but Adam’s conception of it was so wildly inventive and fun that it became the most famous car in movie history.

The sets for Goldfinger were no less well imagined. Everyone has their own fave: the gorgeous apartment where Bond wakes to find his lover covered in gold paint, the vast Bank of England dining hall — bad brandy, good cigars — where Bond gets the details of his mission, the cavernous laser room where our intrepid hero nearly becomes special agent castratum, the plush confines of the Lockheed jet where Bond meets Pussy Galore and outfoxes the clever peep-holes used by the lovely Mei-Lei.

Everything in the film drips with the opulence, style, and color for which the Bond series is known — all of it spawned from the mind of Ken Adam, and laid out in drawings inspired by his life experiences and unique visual sense. “No design is worth doing if you just reproduce reality,” he stresses. “I don’t believe you can get a sense of reality by copying. I think you can get that better by not copying. But you must always be honest. You mustn’t do things just to create chi-chi effects. You must have a reason.”

Take Auric Goldfinger’s breathtaking Kentucky country estate, with its stables and Playboy Mansion-like diversions. Adam remembers that

We called the set where he keeps the harnesses and tack the rumpus room. . . I knew this rumpus room had to convert into a gas chamber, so all the walls were designed to close. Even the big stainless steel fireplace came down so that no fresh air could get in. It was pretty horrifying, actually.

And at the same time the other moving objects, like the billiard table, had a practical purpose by turning round and becoming the briefing model of the raid on Fort Knox. The rotating bar was a little gratuitous, but once I’d started I thought, “I might as well!” So it turned from a rather harmless-looking, luxurious tack room into a combined War Room and gas chamber.

Check out the finished set in the following clip, and as each shot reveals new architectural glories and wonders, keep in mind that this isn’t some real-life room rented from a billionaire’s mansion, it’s a movie set, built from scratch and designed from the ground up by Ken Adam:

Theatergoers in 1964 were dazzled by these ingenious sets, and almost a half-century later they have yet to lose their ability to inspire awe.

This elaborate design came from a deeper place in Adam’s psyche than may at first be apparent. He lived most of his life in England, but he was born Klaus Hugo Adam in 1921 Berlin, emigrating to the UK only when the rise of Hitler threatened his family’s safety. During the war he became the only German-born pilot in the Royal Air Force, serving his adopted country with distinction against the country he was originally from. Twenty years later, during the making of Goldfinger, he still hadn’t got past the dichotomy of his upbringing. “Remember it was the 1960s,” says Adam:

The Second World War was still very much in everybody’s minds. . . I had to keep in mind that all the gangsters are going to be finally poisoned by gas, you see. . . .

When the Germans now write about me, it’s not that they say, “he was affected by the sadistic ideas of the period,” but I grew up with some of these things. So knowingly or not knowingly, I tried to show some of those impressions, my early impressions, in my designs. . . it’s mixing this kind of playful fantasy with the ultimate horror.

Given Adam’s background and influences, it’s not going too far to posit that Goldfinger’s luxurious abode, so wondrous and modern yet laced with a sinister aspect, beggars comparisons to places like The Berghof, Hitler’s “eagle’s nest” hideaway in the Bavarian Alps, where profoundly evil men enjoyed the very best wine, women and song as they poured over intricate maps, scale-models and globes while plotting the assembly-line domination and destruction of whole populations. And the fiendishly clever bit of mechanized death that lies at the heart of Goldfinger’s “rumpus room,” with every avenue of escape clipped off like the tickings of a well-designed watch, evokes painful memories of the meticulously engineered real-life abattoirs of the Holocaust.

“In hindsight,” Adam says, “I think Goldfinger was maybe the best example of a Bond film that I designed, where the settings accentuate the dramatic message of the film. I had a completely free hand.”

The Cold War was a constant presence in the work of Adam throughout the Sixties, not only in the Bond series but in films such as Dr. Strangelove (1964 — where he designed the memorable War Room for Stanley Kubrick, foregoing the chance to work on From Russia, With Love to take the job), as well as more realistic spy films like The Ipcress File (1965) and Funeral in Berlin (1966), both starring Michael Caine. But perhaps his single greatest Cold War set, the one that veers the furthest into cinematic outrageousness while remaining utterly convincing, was the interior of the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox as depicted at the end of Goldfinger.

“I’d seen the vault of the Bank of England,” says Adam, “and you know gold is so heavy, so it’s never stacked more than two foot or two-foot-six high. . . I’m sure the inside of Fort Knox is very dull, with low vaults and a few trolleys traveling around.” But of course, for a Bond movie dull simply won’t do. “The public wanted to see gold!” Adam thought, and so he gave it to them using all of the sumptuous splendor he could muster. “If you go to the biggest gold depository in the world you expect to see gold towering up to the heavens. . . I wanted to build a cathedral of gold, almost forty foot high — completely impractical.”

Adam was aided by the fact that, due to stringent security, virtually no one among the public knew what the interior of the Depository looked like. There were no pictures floating around, no descriptions of any kind:

Remember, the President of the United States wasn’t allowed inside. And I was really rather pleased about that. Because it gave me the opportunity to design it the way I thought it should be designed, with gold stacked up to forty feet in height. I also liked the concept of putting the gold behind bars, you know, spectators being on the other side. I liked playing around with that. . . a surreality, which in fact is accepted by the audience as reality.

The final result of his designs inspired veneration in audiences. Film scholar Christopher Frayling, a keen follower of Adam’s career, recalls his first viewing of Goldfinger back in 1964: “The audience erupted with applause — even at a matinée — when Oddjob got his comeuppance by being electrocuted. . . I’d never known a cinema audience to spontaneously applaud like that. But there was something about the way in which the sequence worked; it satisfied everybody.”

The towers of gold, the impregnable bars, the futuristic elevators, Oddjob’s deadly bowler hat, the bomb threatening to make the bullion holdings of the United States radioactive — all of these things were designed by Adam and the rest of Goldfinger’s art department out of whole cloth, following Adam’s crucial decision to go whole-hog and make the Bond series not a humdrum copy of reality but the stuff of which cinematic dreams are made of.

Adam likes telling an apocryphal story “from reliable sources” about how the newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan, upon entering the White House for the first time, demanded to see the War Room from Dr. Strangelove and was dejected when his handlers informed the “amiable dunce” that none in fact existed outside of the film. Liberals have perpetuated the story ad nauseam ever since (usually prefacing it by such well-worn phrasings as “it was said that. . . ,” “I’ve heard that. . . ,” “According to many sources. . . ”) because it fits neatly into their fantasy view of conservatives in general and Reagan in particular. But, although they won’t admit it, many of those same people were themselves taken in by the glittering interior of Fort Knox in Goldfinger. “Everyone is now convinced Fort Knox looks like that,” Adam says, “As a film designer you can create a reality which is more acceptable to the public than the actual thing. . . United Artists got so many letters saying, how were we allowed in when the president wasn’t allowed, and so on. So I consider that a successful design.”

The late critic David Sylvester went much further than that, calling Adam’s sets “probably the most amazing and enthralling pieces of fantastic architecture in the history of talking pictures.” Millions of viewers around the world — from Presidents on down to the poorest kid at the cheapest matinée — would agree.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our pleasure cruise of Goldfinger with a study of the best critical volume written about Bond, wherein a conservative writer defended 007 in the wake of a widespread academic and media backlash against the series.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Three books about Ken Adam. Production design is rarely given full-book treatments, even as other aspects of filmmaking are immortalized in hundreds of volumes of criticism and analysis. The work of two-time Academy Award-winner Ken Adam, however, is featured in no less than three major retrospective editions: Moonraker, Strangelove, and Other Celluloid Dreams: The Visionary Art of Ken Adam by Ken Adam and David Sylvester, Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design by Christopher Frayling, and Ken Adam Designs the Movies: James Bond and Beyond by Adam and Frayling. All are meaty, colorful books filled with drawings and photos illustrating the intricate and inspired work that went into the design of such Bond films as Dr. No, Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker, not to mention Dr. Strangelove and the dozens of other movies he worked on throughout his career.

Ken Adam (production designer). This 150-page oral history transcript is housed at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library, and can be accessed and read by any interested scholar in the Los Angeles area. The interviews contained in the transcript were conducted in 2002 by Jennifer Peterson.

Article on Ken Adam in frieze magazine. Frieze bills itself as “the leading magazine of contemporary art and culture.” This piece by Dan Fox, published in Issue 51 for March-April 2000 and now reprinted on the web, is notable for its expert analysis of the artistry underlining Adam’s designs and drawings.

Christopher Frayling discussions with Ken Adam. These candid interviews took place in 2008. The sound on the videos could be a lot better, but if you persevere you will hear some interesting stories about Adam’s work on Dr. No, Dr. Strangelove, Goldfinger, and production design in general.

Ken Adam, designer — Cold War Modern. Here’s an Adam excerpt from a much longer documentary, with more interview material about his life and career.

I did not see more than a handful of contemporary releases that came close to the smart pacing, narrative sophistication and honest passion of these older films.

Though I will give a strong nod to 500 Days of Summer and Funny People, two fine films. Both are beautifully written, carefully structured and oh what a relief, they vigorously espouse what can only be described as (mostly) conservative values, a welcome relief in this post-modern age where nihilism passes for, ahem, cutting edge entertainment.

But I roll with classic Hollywood, silent movies and films from Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Keep in mind that most of the movies on my list were produced on modest budgets, never intended as studio blockbusters.

I’m not claiming that any of these movies are classics like The Crowd or Seven Samurai. I am saying that these ten films are grand entertainment from Hollywood’s great dream factory and well worth seeking out.

Ernest Torrence, John Gilbert and Mary Nolan fight over the last drop of water in Desert Nights, 1929.

10. Desert Nights, 1929, starring John Gilbert, Ernest Torrence and Mary Nolan. Directed by William Nigh. Titles by Marian Ainslee, Adaptation by Endre Bohem.

This was Gilbert’s last silent movie. To an adoring public he was known as The Great Lover. At one point, Gilbert was the highest paid actor at MGM earning a cool million a year. But Gilbert, enormously self-destructive, got into hot water with his boss L.B. Mayer and then booze, babes, and sound finished off a great career.

Here, Gilbert plays Hugh Roland, the woman-starved manager of an African diamond mine. Lord Stonehill, Ernest Torrence, and his daughter Diana, Mary Nolan, arrive to visit the mine. But they are impostors who grab a sack of diamonds then kidnap Roland. The trio ends up stranded in the Kalahari Desert. Not knowing how to survive in the sun-baked waste, the thieves are forced to rely on their hostage in order to stay alive.

Mary Nolan, real name Mary Imogene Robertson, born into poverty on a Kentucky farm, was at age 15, a Ziegfeld beauty nicknamed “Bubbles”—draw your own conclusions. With shimmering blond hair and a shirt open to her waist, Nolan gives off Pre-Code heat like a destroying angel.

Mary Nolan, studio portrait. Before liquor, drugs and a string of abusive relationships destroyed her career and her life.

She’s a scrumptious dame who enjoys the feel of a rifle in her arms as much as a man. Nolan, almost totally forgotten, was even more self-destructive than Gilbert. A string of abusive men—including MGM fixer Eddie Mannix—beat her to a pulp. She ended up a hopeless heroin addict, and in 1948, Nolan died in Cedars Sinai of Los Angeles weighing just 70 lbs. She was 43 years old.

Desert Nights has a running time of just sixty-five minutes. It moves like a bullet and combines action and romance in a nifty, unpretentious package.

Here’s a clip from the first few minutes of the film. Gilbert gets a look at Nolan’s exquisite face at about the three-minute mark. His reaction shot is beautifully modulated. And watch what Mary does right after she hooks Gilbert.

–

9. Parole Girl, 1933, starring Mae Clarke, Marie Prevost and Ralph Bellamy, directed by Eddie Cline. Screenplay by Norman Krasna.

This film is definitely a B movie elevated by Mae Clarke’s memorable performance. Parole Girl—fabulous title—is another Pre-Code goodie that explores one of Hollywood’s most durable stories: a (sorta) good girl gone (sorta) bad, only to go (truly) good once she meets the right man.

Clarke plays a sympathetic con artist who ends up in jail—the scene where she begs for mercy is gut-wrenching—and once behind bars she swears vengeance against the department store manager, strait-laced Ralph Bellamy, who refused to give her a break.

When she exits prison Mae is wearing a shockingly post-modern geometric hairdo that frames her as a sleek, deco avenger. The film is stuffed with plot contrivances that, upon reflection, are just plain bizarro. But Mae’s sincere and naturalistic acting style gives credibility to the whiplash plot turns. Her revenge is tricking Bellamy into a sham marriage—don’t ask.

Mae Clarke, her geometric haircut makes her look like a sleek Deco avenger, Parole Girl, 1933.

This little gem zips along at a dazzling pace, clocking in at—hey, I’m sensing a pattern here—sixty-five minutes.

The photography is lush and effervescent, filled with gorgeous shots that you don’t expect from a Columbia programmer. The Director of Photography was Joe August who in the 20’s and 30’s shot films for John Ford, Howard Hawks, Lewis Milestone and Frank Borzage.

Mae and her gold-digging sidekick Marie Prevost—former Sennett cutie-pie she died an alcoholic, alone and broke in a cheap hotel room—are down at the heel dames, always dressed at the height of fashion. Even the notoriously cheap and vulgar head of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, understood that no matter how poor was a depression-era girl, the public yearned to see their stars draped in furs and bias cut silk gowns.

Mae Clarke is best remembered for getting a pineapple in her face—here’s my post about that famous scene—but if not for her fragile mental state, she could have been one of Hollywood’s greatest stars. TCM programs this beaut every once in a while, so check their schedule.

8. Tell it to the Marines, 1926, starring Lon Chaney, Billy Haines, Eleanor Boardman, and Carmel Meyers. Directed by George W. Hill. Screenplay by Richard Schayer. Titles by Joseph Farnham.

Tell it to the Marines, 1926. Billy Haines looks on as Lon Chaney romances Eleanor Boardman.

U.S. Marine Sergeant O’Hara, Lon Chaney, in one of the few films in which he’s not in make-up, has his hands full training raw recruits. ‘Skeet’ Burns, Billy Haines, is a brash and uncooperative Marine. And to make things worse, Burns also sets his sights on nurse Nora Dale, the lovely Eleanor Boardman, whom Sergeant O’Hara secretly loves.

This is a lovely and unexpected romantic comedy from Lon Chaney, best known for playing unfortunates like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera.

Here’s clip where ladies man Haines makes a move on Eleanor Boardman:

–

Chaney (1883-1930) was one of the great stars of the silent screen. He only made one sound movie, the very strange The Unholy Three, 1930, before cancer of the throat killed him. Watching him work without make-up is a revelation and a joy. He plays a classic American character, rigid but fair, tough yet vulnerable. His face is weathered with deep creases, signs of wisdom gained through a lifetime of war and barracks humor. It’s an iconic American performance. Tell it to the Marines was Lon Chaney’s biggest moneymaker.

Lon Chaney as Sergeant O’Hara.

George W. Hill was a fine director who got his start as an assistant to D.W. Griffith. Before becoming a director Hill was an accomplished cinematographer who was known for his skill in lighting leading ladies. In 1929 Hill scored another huge success with The Big House starring Wallace Beery. And in 1930, Hill again hit box office and creative magic with Min and Bill, making Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler MGM’s biggest stars for the next four years. Tragically, Hill was in a serious car accident at the peak of his career. His injuries caused intense physical and personal anguish. In 1933, he was discovered in his Malibu home dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 38 years old.

7. Bed of Roses, 1933, starring Constance Bennett, Joel McCrea and Pert Kelton. Directed by Gregory La Cava. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock.

Constance Bennett was an actress who specialized in playing diamond draped society girls. Here, in a witty and carefully structured script by the great Wanda Tuchock, Bennett is a gum chewing—though very well dressed—prostitute, who, in league with her wisecracking sidekick Pert Kelton, get hapless men drunk before robbing them. The hard-boiled tone of the film is economically established in the first scene where, released from jail, the prison matron cautions Kelton: “Miss Brown, you’re much too impulsive.” Drawls Pert: “I ain’t got an impulse left.” Constance and Pert sashay around with hands resting languorously on their hips. They whistle at men and call them “big boy” before heartlessly taking them to the cleaners.

This is yet another Pre-Code stunner, with dialogue and narrative details that disappeared after The Motion Picture Code was enforced in 1934. It’s a moral fable deliciously soaked in sin and gin.

Constance Bennett meets and is mightily attracted to handsome and rugged Joel McCrea, the honest skipper of a cotton boat. But she chooses to score big by tricking a wealthy publisher into—here we go again—a sham marriage. Will Constance live a life of loveless luxury or will she choose true love as the wife of a river rat?

Constance Bennett, studio portrait. For three wonderfully informative essays about Constance and her entire dysfunctional show biz family, head on over to Self-Styled Siren.

Bennett, a clotheshorse thin as a willow, strains a bit in the role of a bawdy hooker. It’s not who she is. Bennett’s inner patrician fights the character’s wanton nature. Nevertheless, this is one of Constance Bennett’s most surprising and interesting performances.

I couldn’t find any clips from the film but I did find this great 1937 “educational” short of Bennett demonstrating her daily beauty routine. Highly informative.

–

Anyhoo, back to Bed of Roses. Pert Kelton, a talented actress who excelled in playing hard luck tramps, was cast as the original Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners. But Kelton was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and replaced by Audrey Meadows. In her later years, Kelton was featured in a series of Spic and Span commercials that fixed her image as a product pitcher. Bed of Roses is longer than Desert Nights and Parole Girl—by two minutes. We who work in contemporary Hollywood have a lot to learn about structure, narrative economy, and pacing from Hollywood’s Golden Age.

6. The Godless Girl, 1929, starring Lina Basquette, Marie Prevost and Tom Keene, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Story by Jeanie MacPherson. Titles by Beulah Marie Dix.

During production of The Godless Girl, Lina Basquette, recent widow of Sam Warner, found solace in the arms of ace cameraman  Pev Marley—always a smart move for an actress who wants to guarantee a glamorous celluloid image.

We tend to forget that Cecil B. DeMille was, at one time, a pioneering visual stylist. In 1928, DeMille hired Lina Basquette for the lead role in The Godless Girl. In her outrageous and addictive memoir, Basquette claims that during the private casting session with DeMille, he reached into her blouse and fondled her breast, assuring her that he only wanted to make sure she was a cooperative actress. She was.

Basquette plays Judy, a militant high school atheist. A clash between the atheists and Christians leads to a riot in which a student is killed. Basquette and the Christian Boy are sentenced to a state reformatory where DeMille and his longtime scenario writer/mistress, Jeanie MacPherson, dwell lovingly on the cruelty and corruption of the facility.

This all sounds incredibly heavy handed and it is. It’s also sort of glorious and The Godless Girl makes for compelling viewing. The riot scene, a huge set-piece, is viciously staged and so effective I was chewing my handkerchief throughout. And the shot of a girl falling down the cavernous stairwell is genuinely haunting. Here’s a clip showing the riot and the death spiral. Note the eloquent monorail—specially constructed by DP Pev Marley for this film—shot on the staircase. In this way DeMille nails the geography of the brawl and it’s kinetic effect.

–

Naturally, there’s a love story between atheist Basquette and the lantern jawed Christian, played by Tom Keene. There are two striking scenes where the lovers ink over their prison numbers creating poetic new words—a clever and lyrical touch.

Lina Basquette began her career as a Ziegfeld ballerina. She performed with, among others, Louise Brooks and Desert Night’s Mary Nolan. Lina states that her virginity was such a precious and rare commodity in Hollywood that Mommy Basquette sold her as an 18-year old child-bride to Sam Warner, the Warner brother responsible for bringing sound to the movies.

Constance Bennett,  a guest at the wedding, consoled the unhappy virgin bride, who was, after the ceremony, vomiting in the restroom, with these words:

“Actually, Sam’s not a bad guy—as men go.”

Constance, mercenary to the core, further counseled Basquette: “Just be sure, after you give, you get.”

Studio portrait of DeMille’s Godless Girl. After she left Hollywood in 1943, Basquette became a noted breeder of Great Danes.

Basquette’s Hollywood career was not distinguished, but her private life was, well, epic. She married seven times, compulsively fell in and out of love with drunks, rogues, and liars. She actually rates her numerous lovers in her wacky memoir, Lina: DeMille’s Godless Girl. Among others, Basquette had violent and passionate affairs with heavyweight Jack Dempsey, mobster Johnny Roselli and finally Ludwig, a Nazi.

She also claims that Hitler, in a private audience in Berchtesgaden, offered her the opportunity to be Germany’s biggest movie star. In a scene that seems lifted out of a Mel Brooks movie, Lina insists that love-struck Adolph tried to rape her. As horny Hitler groped, Basquette breathlessly cried out that her grandfather was Jewish. Der Fuhrer quickly lost interest.

The Godless Girl is a compelling and hugely entertaining film, with fluid camera work and some stunning visuals. The film culminates with a massive fire in the reformatory, a jaw-dropping conflagration that rivals the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind.

Next week, the top five movies I screened in 2009.

And here’s my list from 2008.

© Robert J. Avrech

It’s 1944 in Nazi-occupied France. Joseph Goebbels’ (Sylvester Groth) latest film triumph starring Germany’s latest hero, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), is set to premiere for the top brass of the Third Reich – including the big cheese himself, Adolf Hitler – and their guests. Funnily enough, the premiere is to be held in a cinema owned by Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish refugee with her own obvious reasons for hating the Nazis. Naturally, she plans her revenge for the fateful night.

Meanwhile the Basterds, a crack group of Jewish-American soldiers under the leadership of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), is undercover in France and “in the business of killing Nazis, and business is booming.” Those Nazis who manage to escape death are given meaningful souvenirs of their time with the Basterds. The paths of these two groups cross in a way that only Tarantino, master of gory coincidence, could imagine.

A good ol’ boy and Jews brutally mowing down Nazis. What’s not to like? It’s probably one of the few times you’ll see a redneck positively portrayed in Hollywood.

Don’t be fooled by the trailers that feature Pitt prominently. The film is an ensemble effort, with all of the key players turning in fine performances. Probably one of the best performances is by Christoph Waltz as the cold, evil, calculating Col. Hans Landa, whose unofficial nickname is the “Jew Hunter.” A true chameleon, he’s the master of charm one moment and a murderous bastard the next. No one – and I mean no one – can trust him. (I’ll never view an innocent glass of milk in the same way again.)

This is not your average World War II film. The heroes aren’t conventional “good guys,” but flawed human beings who don’t always come out on top. There are a number of “knots in the stomach” moments as you wait to see if someone will be exposed, and long conversations and monologues serve to heighten the tension. The sometimes choppy cinematography, ridiculously long close-ups, cheesy music and vigilante-style justice all contribute to the theme of a spaghetti Western set during World War II. It’s not all serious, however – there are a few laughs. There are also a few helpful voice-overs that give crucial background information, even though they are somewhat odd.

If you hate Quentin Tarantino’s films, you’ll probably hate this one. By the same token, if you love his films, this one’s for you. I remember being horrified by “Pulp Fiction,” but either I’ve become more jaded over time or the “violent with a purpose” theme works for me – or both. Think about it: Nazis getting a taste of their own vile medicine. It’s quite a satisfying scenario. And the unabashed pro-American stance is refreshing as well.

Just this week, the New York Times ran an article about the fact that A-list stars are failing to deliver big returns on their movies. But these days, Americans expect a lot for their entertainment dollar. It doesn’t matter how big the star is; if the movie’s crap, it’s going to bomb. No matter how big the name, it can’t save a rotten film. And with regard to “Basterds,” I found the premise intriguing enough to overcome my dislike of Brad Pitt and plunk down my $10.50. Oh, and keep an eye out for an almost-unrecognizable Mike Myers.

As to be expected in a Tarantino film, there is plenty of violence and gore, but not the slick kind that you’re used to seeing in the usual blockbuster. It’s raw and it’s very realistic – the woman next to me gasped out loud a number of times. If you have a weak stomach, think twice before going. And really, kids should not see this one. In fact, they were actually checking ID at the theater – which, by the way, was packed full.