Quentin Tarantino picks favorite WWII movies

LOS ANGELES — With his own World War II flick, ``Inglourious Basterds,‘’ hitting theaters Friday, Quentin Tarantino applies his exhaustive knowledge of cinema to single out five favorite World War II flicks.
 
Not necessarily a Top Five, this off-the-cuff list includes a couple of the well-known and loved war stories along with more obscure dramas, among them two that Tarantino himself did not know about until he started research for ``Inglourious Basterds’‘:

``The Great Escape’‘ — Is there any cooler World War II premise than John Sturges’ 1963 epic about a mass escape of Allied POWs from a Nazi prison camp, or a cooler cast than Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and Donald Pleasence? ``Probably my favorite war movie,‘’ Tarantino said. ``That’s one of the most entertaining movies ever made and was kind of the touchstone goal for (``Inglourious Basterds’‘) to one degree or another. ... Make a World War II movie that’s just entertaining, that you just enjoy watching the movie.‘’

``The Dirty Dozen’‘ — Robert Aldrich’s 1967 saga is the ultimate example of the men-on-a-mission war subgenre that inspired Tarantino’s ``Inglourious Basterds.‘’ Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland and Telly Savalas are featured in the tale of imprisoned bottom-feeders who get a second chance as part of a hell-raising Allied commando unit. Tarantino said this film deserves to be on his list ``for its iconic cast alone.‘’ Tarantino went on: ``I never follow the normal dance card that the genre or the subgenres I deal in usually play by. It usually is a situation where I sit down, OK, I’m going to do my `Dirty Dozen,‘ and that’s what sits me down, but then I also know that hopefully, I will deliver the pleasure that is found in those genres, but I’m just going to deliver them very differently. It’s going to become something else. I want it to become something bigger and more expansive than that given subgenre.‘’

``Five Graves to Cairo’‘ — Ten years before he made ``Stalag 17,‘’ Billy Wilder directed this 1943 tale centered on an undercover British officer (Franchot Tone) and a woman (Anne Baxter) who helps run a desert hotel where Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Erich von Stroheim) establishes his headquarters. ``One of my favorite war stories, hands-down,‘’ Tarantino said. ``Billy Wilder and (co-writer) Charles Brackett wrote their own story for it. It doesn’t follow history. They came up with their own way. It’s not even a very credible version of Rommel, either, but it’s a fantastic version of Rommel.‘’

``Tonight We Raid Calais’‘ — John Brahm’s 1943 adventure casts John Sutton as a British intelligence officer plotting to destroy a Nazi munitions plant in France, where he takes shelter with the family of a French farmer (Lee J. Cobb), whose daughter blames the British for the fall of France. The screenplay is an early credit for Academy Award winner Waldo Salt (``Midnight Cowboy,‘’ ``Coming Home’‘). ``One of the movies I discovered while I was doing research on this. A fantastic movie that I fell in love with,‘’ Tarantino said. ``It has a couple of sequences that really seem like modern storytelling. It doesn’t have a classical storytelling feel. Waldo Salt, they consider him the father of modern screenwriting. We can see it right in there. It feels like storytelling today.‘’

``Action in Arabia’‘ — Russian director Leonide Moguy made a few films in Hollywood during the war, including this 1944 thriller starring George Sanders as a reporter in the Middle East who’s caught up in the Allied-Nazi struggle for the sympathies of the Arab world. ``Another movie I discovered and fell in love with,‘’ Tarantino said. ``I really love that movie, but you will notice, though, when I talk about these different films, it’s not the collection of tanks and big-battle things. Even though I like that stuff, I’m more into the more story-oriented versions of the war.‘’