The other side of the ‘Good War’

Think “The Story of G.I. Joe,’’ or “Sands of Iwo Jima,’’ with John Wayne.

This is not the kind of World War II film that interests Quentin Tarantino. Preferring dirt to glory, the savage to the sappy, Tarantino has long championed a certain kind of no-frills genre exercise, inspired by the grindhouse classics of his youth and video-store young manhood. So it should shock no one that Tarantino’s WWII film, “Inglourious Basterds,’’ is less “The Longest Day’’ and more “The Dirty Dozen.’’ The plot - or at least part of it - is practically lifted from “Dirty Dozen’’: Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) recruits American Jewish soldiers for a no-holds-barred company of Nazi killers, each of whom is required to provide the colonel with one hundred Nazi scalps as part of his mission.

In fact, the arrival of “Inglourious Basterds’’ is a reminder that the revisionist World War II film, seeking to undercut the “Good War’’ allure of that conflict, has been around for almost as long as its more sedate counterparts.

In film history, the revisionist impulse has struck whenever and wherever myth has substantially overtaken reality, necessitating a reminder of forgotten principles. Revisionist westerns emphasized the brutality of the Wild West; revisionist musicals chose not to keep turning that frown upside down. Revisionist war films seek to complicate the simplistic story lines of the original Second World War films. Mostly, they seek to return the violence to movies that had grown safely sanitized, and to complicate our too-worshipful relationship to the soldiers of the “Greatest Generation.’’

The sub-genre may not quite have begun with Robert Aldrich’s 1967 “The Dirty Dozen.’’ Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17’’ is pretty unsentimental about its American prisoners of war but it seems as good a place as any to start. Where previous World War II films had emphasized the rigors of duty, “The Dirty Dozen’’ - with its criminals as military heroes - unashamedly enumerated the joys of violence. These men were not just killers; they were killers with the best possible permission slip for mayhem, at least until “Inglourious’’ Nazi hunting. It is the ultimate guy’s movie, all brawn and no heart; Nora Ephron had it exactly right when the men of “Sleepless in Seattle’’ mock-sob over its ending, preferring its destructiveness to the tragic romance of “An Affair to Remember.’’

“Patton,’’ 1970’s best picture winner directed by Franklin J. Schaffner from a script by Francis Ford Coppola, similarly embraces the animal pleasures of combat. George C. Scott’s title character is a brute straight out of Sam Fuller’s “The Steel Helmet,’’ a warrior distinctly out of place in the era of Vietnam. His unsentimental delight in war is both his making and his undoing. “Patton’’ is strangely of two minds about his hero; is he the savior of the US Army, or a 20th century Neanderthal?

Speaking of Fuller, the legendary B director was himself a WWII veteran. Notoriously gutted upon release, “The Big Red One’’ (1980) is an unsentimental war film from one of the least sentimental of American directors. Fuller had turned down offers to direct “The Longest Day’’ and “Patton,’’ and “Big Red One’’ is his response to those sanitized, top-down depictions of the war. It is not quite a great film. Fuller’s sloppiness never allowed for perfection, but it is a GI’s film, made by a former GI, with the perspective firmly fixed to the next patch of ground, the next ridge.

In Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan’’ (1998), the traditional combat unit is resuscitated, and subtly tweaked. All the familiar faces are here, but the atmosphere has changed. Spiel berg is no revisionist - if anything, he is a devoted preservationist - but the passage of time has rendered portions of the original formula unworkably naive. “Private Ryan’’ was misty-eyed about war, its solemnity about WWII a marked contrast with Spielberg’s thematically jumbled post-Pearl Harbor comedy “1941.’’

Clint Eastwood had no such reverence about the conflict, and his twin reverse-shot views of the war were devoted, surprisingly, to debunking its comforting lies. Both “Flags of Our Fathers’’ (2006) and “Letters From Iwo Jima’’ (2006) preferred lesser-known stories of the war: the unpleasant aftermath for the Marines who lifted the flag on Iwo Jima, and the Japanese soldiers who fought there. The latter film in particular was an astonishingly audacious artistic act: an American icon - Dirty Harry himself! - directing a sober, bare-bones Japanese-language film that empathetically documented the plight of Axis soldiers.

An African-American man sits in front of his television, watching John Wayne fight World War II once more. “We fought for this country, too,’’ the veteran mutters, a low fury creeping into his voice. Spike Lee’s “Miracle at St. Anna’’ (2008), bloated and sentimental at moments, embodies the director’s desire to write African-Americans back into the story of the fight against the Nazis. By its very existence, “St. Anna’’ is an implicit rebuke to the whitewashed war fought by Wayne and the other action heroes of the back lot. The action is sub-Spielberg, and the characterization, which echoes the classic unit structure, creeps dangerously close to cliche, but given the film’s Italian locale, its African-American soldiers, and the “miracle’’ of its title, Lee is thinking of perhaps the first revisionist World War II film: Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 “Paisan.’’

Tarantino’s entry is the seal of approval, or the nail in the coffin, to this serious-minded genre, a sign that World War II has ceased to be a matter of the utmost historical urgency, and instead has become another genre, like the samurai film, the crime thriller, or the western, that Tarantino can mess around with.

The ultimate cineast-director, Tarantino has clearly familiarized himself with the rituals of the genre, but his imagination is too restless to be contained by it. Leaving history firmly behind, “Basterds’’ is another blood-soaked Tarantino revenge fantasy: “Kill Adolf.’’ The director has deliberately sacrificed the revisionist war film’s greatest claim on audiences - veracityin favor of an audacious inventiveness. “Inglourious Basterds’’ is not satisfied with revising the depiction of the war onscreen; it ultimately sees fit to revise the war itself.