One Of The Best WWII Movies Ever Made Lands On Netflix Today

The best new movie on Netflix is a must-watch WWII drama.

Credit: Universal

There are roughly three eras of Quentin Tarantino films. The storied director began his career with crime dramas. His debut film, Reservoir Dogs, introduced us to his trademark banter and non-chronological storytelling. He followed that up with the smash hit, Pulp Fiction, which honed and refined and exaggerated everything that made Reservoir Dogs great.

Tarantino’s third offering, Jackie Brown, was based Elmore Leonard’s novel, Rum Punch, and while it certainly was a major shift for the director, it still fits nicely in his “crime drama” phase.

The two Kill Bill films, while still about crime and criminals and ninja assassins, set themselves apart from his earlier works. These were action movies, and specifically martial arts films, though they carried on his penchant for nonlinear storytelling. A longtime lover of old Sonny Chiba, Tarantino had already sprinkled his films with references to the martial arts legend. Now, he took that to a new level, even casting Chiba in Kill Bill Part 1. We’d seen Chiba before in Tarantino’s True Romance, though Tarantino did not direct that film. Tony Scott directed and made major changes to Tarantino’s script. Christian Slater’s Clarence was a huge Sonny Chiba fan in that film (and an obvious Tarantino self-insert).

After Kill Bill, Tarantino partnered with Robert Rodriguez on Grindhouse, a double-feature that included Tarantino’s Death Proof and Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. Death Proof was very much another action movie, this time about a serial killer who used his car to kill young women. Still crime-oriented, sure, but not really of a piece with Tarantino’s earlier films.

Everything after that can be safely referred to as Tarantino’s historical drama phase, with several of his later films falling squarely into the “historical revisionism” genre. Even his most recent film, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, is historical revisionism, this time about the Manson murders. Before that, he directed two Westerns: The Hateful Eight and Django Unchained. But kicking off his historical period was perhaps his most outrageous historical revisionism project of them all: Inglourious Basterds.

The 2009 film starred Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine, the leader of a black ops commando outfit of Jewish American soldiers whose only job was to strike fear into the hearts of Nazis everywhere – and take a few scalps in the process.

The real breakout star of the film, however, was Christoph Waltz, who played the nefariously charming Austrian SS-Standartenführer, Hans Landa. Waltz was terrifying and brilliant in the role, as delightful to watch as he was ominous. The so-called “Jew Hunter” is just that: A man whose great talent for reading people translates into a horrifyingly effective instrument for the Third Reich’s holocaust.

I’m loathe to spoil the plot in any way. It involves a young Jewish woman, Shosanna, who escapes Landa’s clutches and sets out on a quest for revenge against Hitler and his minions. It also spends a great deal of time on Tarantino’s love of filmmaking, with much of the action and drama taking place in a French movie theater, centered around a Nazi propaganda film and its star, the Nazi sniper, Fredrick Zoller.

The subject matter is mostly quite appalling, but somehow Inglourious Basterds manages to be every bit as hilarious as it is galling. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s available starting today on Netflix. If you have, well now’s as good a time as any to watch it again. It may not be the greatest World War II movie ever made – it is perhaps too humorous and too revisionist to ever be considered the best, especially with contenders like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, The Bridge On The River Kwai and so many other classics out there – but it’s up there as one of my personal favorites.

Perhaps most importantly, the film does something new and different with the genre, at once highlighting the atrocities of the Nazi regime while laughing in the face of Hitler and his odious lickspittles It is a good reminder that while the Third Reich was vile and evil and grotesque, the ideology at its center was not merely wicked, but also asinine and ludicrous and worthy of mockery and disdain. Then and now and forever.

Where do you rank Inglourious Basterds in your list of favorite Quentin Tarantino movies? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. You can also sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.