All this talk and final casting reporting on Quentin Tarantino’s sprawling WWII epic, “Inglorious Basterds” has got us thinking. OK, so who are the American bastard soldiers in the screenplay and who’s playing them? Well, we just re-read the script to get it fresh back in our minds. As we’d said when we first read the immense, 168 page screenplay, the Basterds aside from Brad Pitt aren’t as fleshed-out as characters. But on a second read, they appear more three-dimensional (or as much as they can) and you get a bit more of an idea of who they are. There’s so many characters in this damn movie on a first read most of Pitt’s crew do feel like secondary characters and for the most part they still are).
You’ll note that there are nine bastards in total (and possibly ten if you want to be anal about it). Brad Pitt plays Lt. Aldo Raine and at the top of the script he recruits soldiers for his outfit while in England and says, “I’m puttin’ together a special team and I need eight soldiers. Eight – Jewish – American soldiers.”
That makes nine total, but one Basterd, a German named Sergeant Hugo Stiglitz is recruited (rescued) along the way, later in Germany, so technically that means ten. Either way, they’re ruthless, brutal scoundrels and “a bunch of nutters” as General Ed Fenech (Mike Myers) says in the story, but to fight fire with fire against the Nazis, “it takes a thief…” he says.
Who plays who: There’s nine (or ten) Basterds, but only six of them have lines and screentime. So three (or four) other actors/soldiers either have no lines and fill up the frame or probably have 1-2 bones thrown to them while they’re there. By all accounts there is already a revised script from the July 2008 script that everyone is working off of, so bit players might have received some dialogue. Ok, if you haven’t read “Inglorious Bastards” and don’t want semi spoilers (we rarely post those, btw), do not read any further.
Lt. Aldo Raine – Brad Pitt – The Germans nickname him “Aldo the Apache,” for his sick and fucked up command to collect Nazi scalps, Injun style, from dead German men. In fact, he tells his Basterds they must collect 100 Nazi scalps on their mission or “die trying.” British Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) calls him a “rather gruesome sounding dicky bird.” Raine is a hillbilly redneck from the mountains of Tennessee and is admittedly kind of dumb, but he has his military smarts to be sure. With a visible ropeburn around his neck, one must ask: did he survive a lynching? Nobody knows and no one ever mentions the scar.
Sergeant Donny Donowitz – Eli Roth- Nicknamed the “The Bear Jew” by the Germans, Donowitz has has a proclivity for beating Nazi soldiers heads in with a baseball bat. His specialty is pummeling one German to death while one surviving soldier watches in horror and then reveals any Nazi plans he might have been planning on hiding. His character has a ton of screentime including his own personal flashback scene about the history of baseball bat which includes visiting Jewish families in his Boston neighborhood so they can write their loved ones names on his tool of vengeance.
Private First Class Hirschberg – Samm Levine – A loyal and very eager-to-please soldier, PFC Hirschberg is tough and raw and gets pissed easily. He’s almost like Aldo’s right hand man, almost acting as the sidekick in cartoons that yells in agreement, “you tell him, boss!” He taunts a German soldier at the beginning who gets a swastika carved in his forehead and basically is the one telling any living captors they come across, “Dude, you’re fucked.” It’s a meaty-sized role. Hirschberg kicks Bridget Von Hammersmark in the gut for killing a German after all the shooting is done and has a great comedic turn near the end of the film speaking made-up, fake Italian (maybe this is why Tarantino hired a comedian).
Sergeant Wilhelm Wicki – Gedeon Burkhardt – One of the Basterds’ German translators, Wicki is a “Austrian Jew who got out the fuck out of Saltzberg while the getting was good,” says Raine. He immigrated to the U.S., became an American citizen and then enlisted to fight the Nazis. Wicki plays one of the key Counterfeit Germans in the crucial underground bar scene midway through the script. He (major spoiler in white text)… gets shot to death in the German tavern.
Sergeant Hugo Stiglitz – Til Schweiger – A German traitor who joins the Basterds, Stilgitz is notorious with all Nazis for killing 13 Gestapo Officer. He was being sent to Berlin to made an example of when the Basterds rescued him and asked him to join the team (Raine says, “We’re a big fan of your work killin’ Nazis…. But your status as a Nazi Killer is still amateur…We all came to see if you wanna go pro.”). While Donowitz and his baseball-bat bashing proclivities sounds like the nutjob of the bunch it’s actually Stiglitz who is the true, unpredictable psychopath of the bunch and he’s constantly brandishing a knife in his hands with an dead-cold eye to planting in someones chest. He also plays one of the key undercover soldiers acting as a German in the underground bar scene. He gets (spoilers in white text) shot to death in a hail of bullets in the bar.
Private First Class Utivich – B.J. Novak – Utivitch becomes a key player in the film, but not til the end. He’s not even mentioned in the original script until page 87, but even then he doesn’t really say or do anything until the final act. Nicknamed “The little one” or “little man” by the Germans, heck, Utivitch doesn’t even muster a word until page 124 (it’s a 165 page script). From Manhattan, Utivitch can’t drive and most of the Germans are surprised to see that he’s not a total diminutive dwarf. “I mean, you’re a little fellow, but not circus midget little as your reputation would suggest,” says Col Hans Landa at one point. He’s a bit of a whiner.
So that leaves 3-4 more Basterds right?
And according to casting news there’s still Paul Rust, Michael Bacall and Omar Doom. Like we said, none of these guys have speaking parts in the original script, but we’re assured the new version will likely have something for them to say or do. Bacall is apparently playing a Basterd named Zimmerman and Doom is evidently playing a Chaplin-esque soldier according to the message forum over at T. Archives. More info will trickle out soon enough, we’re sure. A little note: Novak is 5’8 which isn’t exactly small and Samm Levine’s character is less of a wimp. Shouldn’t their casting have been reversed with Novack taking Hirschberg and Levine taking Utivitch? (Levine is 5’4) This is how we’ve always pictured it.
