As someone who is a World War II buff, who has pretty much seen every movie made about it and read most of the major tomes on the subject, I always wished it had turned out differently. Anyone who has read anything about the war or talked to the great veterans who served knows that they dreamed that if somehow someone had broken ranks, even in the most cynical of fashion, and successfully taken out the Nazi leadership in a clever plan to save himself, the war would have ended immediately and millions of lives saved. A script that played to that fantasy alone would have been a home run. The fact that a Jewish Dirty Dozen led by the definitively gentile Lee Marvin character, Brad Pitt, managed to connect with a vicious S.S. man to take out that leadership, was true ingenuity. Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue both in the French bar filled with Germans and with the S.S. criminal in a variety of venues was totally realistic even as the movie was one gigantic fantasy. A combination of “To Be or Not to Be” with “The Dirty Dozen” and “Attack,” “Inglourious Basterds” did it for me.
Jim Cramer is the bestselling author of “Mad Money.”
