It is not so much Kill Bill as Kill Adolf. Quentin Tarantino, master of cinematic violence, is about to stir up a hornets’ nest in Germany with a war film that depicts Nazi soldiers having their brains bashed out with a baseball bat wielded by a vengeful American.

Even by the stomach-curdling standards of the US director – the maker of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs – the new film is a veritable blood bath.

Filming starts in Berlin on October 13 and the controversial director is already in the German capital making his final casting decisions. The star role is to be played by Brad Pitt. His character, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, leads a group of American-Jewish soldiers who are dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe to wreak revenge on the Germans and destroy their morale.

The tone of the film, provisionally entitled Inglorious Bastards, is set early on by Lieutenant Raine in a pep talk to his men. According to a leaked version of the script, the officer says: “Every man under my command owes me one hundred Nazi scalps . . . and y’all will git me one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis, or die trying.”

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The prosecutor said: "The conspirators cannot expect to expiate their crime by having their life ended by a decent cartridge"

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It is not just the scalping, or the carving of swastikas in foreheads, or the shooting of a German officer’s testicles, or the slow strangling scene – all shown with Tarantino’s customary love of detail – that is likely to upset the nation and its critics. It is the whole idea of turning the Second World War into a comic book adventure in which not a single German character has redeeming value.

To judge by the leaked Tarantino script, the only good German is a dead one – with the suspense concentrated on how he should die. For modern Germany that represents a regression to the days of the crudest antiGerman war propaganda.

“This is pop culture encountering Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with unprecedented force,” said Tobias Kniebe, film critic of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “The effects of this collision are utterly unpredictable.”

For 60 years German film-makers have used war films as a pedagogic device to show how good Germans should have reacted to the Nazi terror. There has been anguished debate about whether Hollywood should be allowed to make a film about Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the man who tried to blow up Hitler and the closest that the country has to a war hero. The film, starring Tom Cruise, has yet to be screened but Germany’s critics have been sharpening their pens, ready to knock it when it eventually sees the light of day.

The Tarantino film, though, is more likely to give German critics cardiac arrest rather than the perverse pleasure of writing a bad review. “All the German historians and critics who were left gasping for breath by Tom Cruise and his worthy attempts to produce a correct image of Stauffenberg – they will be so shocked by Inglorious Bastardsthat they will savage it on the spot,” said Kniebe. “And perhaps that is precisely [Tarantino’s] plan.” In fact the director is emphasising that the film will not really be about war at all, still less about Germany.

“I don’t want it to feel like a period film,” said Tarantino in an interview before coming to Berlin. “This is a modern, in-your-face movie.”

The film appears to follow in the tradition of The Dirty Dozen – the 1967 work starring Lee Marvin that debunked the standard cinematic American war hero by sending hardened, unbalanced convicts on a suicide mission. There is more than a nod, too, in the direction of an 1978 Italian film, also called Inglorious Bastards, which features anarchic gun-happy deserters in German-occupied France. But if the leaked script bears any resemblance to the final product – he wants the film ready for the Cannes Festival next year – this will be pure Tarantino, right down to the brain tissue splattered on the walls.

Cinematic conflicts

— Steven Spielberg’s Munich, above, provoked rage among conservative critics in 2005 for suggesting that the West had a role in perpetuating the violence in the Middle East

— Yamato: The Last Battle, a Japanese film about a battleship sunk by Americans in the Second World War, provoked anger in 2005. China and South Korea, Japan’s former enemies, objected to its sympathetic portrayal of the crew

— Ken Burn’s 14-hour film about the US role in the Second World War was criticised for entirely ignoring the 500,000 Latino GIs who served in the US forces

— The Sri Lankan High Commission protested to the British Board of Film Certification in 2003, asking for the film In the Name of Buddha to be banned. It argued that its graphic violence would upset peace talks with the Tamil Tigers

— Clint Eastwood’s film Flags of Our Fathers provoked a war of words between the director and Spike Lee after Lee accused Eastwood of ignoring the African-American contribution to the Second World War

— Catholics rallied against Elizabeth: The Golden Age, claiming that the battle scenes painted Catholics in a uniformly evil light

Source: Times Archive

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