Brad Pitt as Lieutenant Aldo in ‘Inglourious Basterds’

Quentin Tarantino danced his way up the red carpet Wednesday as he sent a squad of Nazi-killing “Inglourious Basterds” into Cannes on a mission to capture the film festival’s top prize.

He and French actress Melanie Laurent launched with aplomb into the dance routine made famous by John Travolta in Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” which won him the Palme d’Or top prize here in 1994.

Tarantino is hoping to repeat that triumph on Sunday when the 2009 prize is handed to one of the 20 films from around the globe in the running for the coveted gong.

Festival-goers at the red-carpet screening gave the film a highly enthusiastic welcome, giving the director and cast a 10-minute standing ovation.

“It’s the power of cinema that’s going to bring down the Third Reich!” said a buoyant Tarantino earlier after a preview of the “Basterds,” which displays his trademark mix of snappy dialogue, extreme violence, quirky humor and cinematic allusions.

In the genre-blurring Jewish revenge tale - with David Bowie on the soundtrack - Pitt plays Lieutenant Aldo who heads a squad of Jewish-American soldiers behind enemy lines in German-occupied wartime France.

Aldo tells his men to bring him the scalps of 100 Nazis each, and vows to terrorize the German army with the “disemboweled, dismembered and disfigured bodies we leave behind us.”

A parallel storyline involves a Jewish girl bent on revenge after seeing her entire family being wiped out by the Nazis.

Hitler, Goebbels and other members of the Nazi top brass appear in the movie which culminates in an outlandish plot to take out the German leadership at the Paris premiere of a Nazi propaganda film.

“It’s obviously outrageous!” Pitt told reporters after the press screening.

Seventy percent of the film is acted in French or German but 46-year-old Tarantino seemed unconcerned that US audiences might be put off by subtitles.

“I am not an American film maker, I make movies for the planet Earth and Cannes is the place that represents that,” said the director whose career took off with the 1991 film “Reservoir Dogs.”

Initial press reviews online were mixed.

“Quentin Tarantino stormed back to the scene of his greatest triumph today,” said The Times of London.

But The Hollywood Reporter disagreed in a review headlined: “A surprisingly tame war movie from the king of pulp fiction?”

“History will not repeat itself for Quentin Tarantino,” it opined. “‘Inglourious Basterds’ merely continues the string of disappointments in this year’s competition.”

The ensemble cast includes Mike Myers, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, the Irish actor Michael Fassbender, and Austrian Christoph Waltz, whose performance as an SS colonel steals the show even from A-lister Pitt.

The orthographically-challenged title of Tarantino’s film borrows its name from a 1978 Italian flick called “The Inglorious Bastards.”

Tarantino refused to say why he had mispelt the words, saying it was an artistic device that would be ruined if he had to spell out its meaning.

Cinema itself is a theme of Tarantino’s movie, as it is in “Broken Embraces” by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, another of the contenders for the Cannes trophy.

A French prison drama, “The Prophet,” was being rated as one of the favorites for the Palme by film trade magazines on Wednesday.

A period romance titled “Bright Star,” by New Zealand director Jane Campion, was also getting warm praise, as was Ken Loach’s film starring French football legend Eric Cantona.

The blood and guts seen in Tarantino’s movie – notably close-up shots of Nazis being scalped by “Basterds” – have been matched in many of the other films vying for the top prize.

From the blood-gushing razor-blade prison murder in “The Prophet” to Johnnie To’s gangster movie “Vengeance,” to Korea’s vampires and the Danish “Antichrist,” violence has been high on the agenda.

Filipino film-maker Brillante Mendoza shows a prostitute relentlessly hacked to pieces with blunt kitchen knives after being beaten, raped and bled to death in his movie about Manila’s gritty underbelly, “Kinatay,” meaning massacre.

“Antichrist,” a thriller by controversial auteur Lars Von Trier ends with a shot of a clitoris being sliced off, while Korea’s Park Chan-wook offers a blood-guzzling vampire priest in “Thirst.”

“The red carpet is earning its color this year,” said The Hollywood Reporter.

In stark contrast was Ang Lee’s awaited latest film “Taking Woodstock,” about the era-defining 1960s hippie festival.

The light-hearted and funny movie failed, however, to impress the critics who lamented that the only tension springs from the sour oppressive mother in the plot.

Source: AFP