Quentin Tarantino's foray into the war film takes its cue from Enzo Castellari's Inglorious Bastards (1977) but it is hardly a straightforward remake of 1970s ‘macaroni combat’. True to Tarantino's highly allusive style, the film's intertextual archive is much larger and, as the misspellings in his title indicate, much more self-consciously playful. One would not enlist Basterds among the earnest hyper-realist war films and TV-series that, beginning with Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, have re-introduced audiences to the heroic protagonist and the good fight. As we have seen in the last chapter, these productions often boast historical consultants and original location shooting to support the conflation of verisimilitude and authenticity. In contrast, Tarantino's costume designer Anna B. Sheppard (whose earlier work included Schindler's List and Polanski's The Pianist) commented on the ‘degree of looseness’ in Tarantino's rendition of the period detail. Sheppard altered Nazi uniforms and invented dress jackets, and her lavish chic for the female characters feels more like Hollywood than wartime Europe (Caranicas 2009: 4).

Inglourious Basterds signals from the very beginning a rather complicated relationship between fiction and its historical base: the first chapter title ‘Once Upon a Time … in Nazi-Occupied France’ points at Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), while the first wide-angle shot – an isolated farm on the edge of a forest, with a man chopping wood – reminds us of the beginnings of George Stevens's classic Western Shane (1953), John Ford's The Searchers (1956) as well as Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992).