Квентин Тарантино: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: The First Novel By Quentin Tarantino

The stuntman removes his brown leather wallet from the back pocket of his blue jeans, opens it up, and makes a show of sliding the white William Morris business card inside. Then the blond fella starts walking down the hall backward to catch up with his boss. But he still continues his comedic patter with the young secretary: “Now, remember, if your mother asks, I’m not taking you to see a dirty movie. I’m taking you to see a foreign film. With subtitles.”

He gives her a wave just before he disappears around the corner and says, “I’ll call you next Friday.”

When Cliff and Miss Himmelsteen saw I Am Curious (Yellow) at the Royal Cinema in West L.A. that Sunday afternoon, they both liked it. When it comes to cinema, Cliff is far more adventurous than his boss. To Rick, movies are what Hollywood made, and with the exception of England, all other countries’ film industries are simply the best they can do, since they’re not Hollywood. But after all the blood and violence Cliff experienced during World War Two, once Cliff returned home, he was surprised at how juvenile he found most Hollywood movies. There were some exceptions— The Ox-Bow Incident, Body and Soul, White Heat, The Third Man, The Brothers Rico, Riot in Cell Block 11— but they were irregularities in a fake normalcy.

After the devastation that the countries of Europe and Asia experienced during the Second World War, once those countries slowly started making movies again, oftentimes surrounded by the bombed-out rubble remnants of the war ( Rome, Open City; Big Deal on Madonna Street ), they discovered they were making them for a far more adult audience.

While in America—and when I say “America” I mean “Hollywood”—a country where its home-front civilians were shielded from the gruesome details of the conflict, their movies remained stubbornly immature and frustratingly committed to the concept of entertainment for the whole family.

To Cliff, who had borne witness to the stark extremities of humanity (like the heads of his Filipino guerrilla brothers stuck on spikes by the occupying Japanese), even the most entertaining actors of his era—Brando, Paul Newman, Ralph Meeker, John Garfield, Robert Mitchum, George C. Scott—always sounded like actors and reacted to events the way only characters in movies did. There was always a level of artifice to the character that stopped it from being convincing. After he got back to the States, Cliff’s favorite Hollywood actor was Alan Ladd. He liked the way the diminutive Ladd would practically swim in the modern forties’ and fifties’ fashions he wore. He didn’t care for him in westerns or war films. He disappeared in cowboy attire and military uniforms. Ladd needed to be in a suit and tie and preferably a snap-brim fedora. Cliff liked his look. He was handsome without being movie-star handsome. Since Cliff was so damn handsome, he appreciated other men who weren’t but didn’t need to be. Alan Ladd looked like a few guys he served with. He also liked that Ladd looked like an American. But he loved the way the little guy fought fistfights in his movies. He loved how he socked the shit outta the character actors who specialized in playing gangsters. He loved that droopy lock of hair that hung in his face during the fight. And he loved how Ladd used to roll around on the floor with the heavies. But his absolute favorite thing about Ladd? His voice. He had a no-nonsense way of delivering his lines. When Ladd acted opposite William Bendix, Robert Preston, Brian Donlevy, or Ernest Borgnine, they all seemed like hambone actors when compared to him. When Ladd got mad in a movie, he didn’t act mad. He just got sore, like a real fella. As far as Cliff was concerned, Alan Ladd was the only guy in movies who knew how to comb his hair, wear a hat, or smoke a cigarette (okay, Mitchum knew how to smoke a cigarette too).

But that just goes to show how unrealistic Cliff found Hollywood films. When he saw Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder , he laughed at what the newspapers referred to as the film’s “shockingly adult language.” He joked with Rick, “Only in a Hollywood movie would ‘spermicide’ be considered ‘shockingly adult.’”

However, when he saw foreign movies, the actors had a level of authenticity that just wasn’t there in Hollywood movies. Hands down, no question about it, Cliff’s favorite actor was Toshiro Mifune . He’d get so into watching Mifune’s face, he’d sometimes forget to read the subtitles. The other foreign actor Cliff dug was Jean-Paul Belmondo . When Cliff saw Belmondo in Breathless , he thought, That guy looks like a fucking monkey. But a monkey I like.

Like Paul Newman, who Cliff liked, Belmondo had movie-star charm.

But when Paul Newman played a bastard, like in Hud, he was still an enjoyable bastard. But the guy in Breathless wasn’t just a sexy stud prick. He was a little creep, petty thief, piece of shit. And unlike in a Hollywood movie, they didn’t sentimentalize him. They always sentimentalized these pieces of shit in Hollywood movies, and it was the phoniest thing Hollywood did. In the real world, these mercenary fuck faces didn’t have a sentimental bone in their body.

That’s why Cliff appreciated Belmondo not doing that with his little shitheel in Breathless. Foreign films, Cliff thought, were more like novels. They didn’t care if you liked the lead characters or not. And Cliff found that intriguing.

So starting in the fifties Cliff started driving to Beverly Hills and Santa Monica and West Los Angeles and Little Tokyo to see black-and-white foreign films with English subtitles.

La Strada, Yojimbo, Ikiru, The Bridge, Rififi, Bicycle Thieves, Rocco and His Brothers, Open City, Seven Samurai, Le Doulos, Bitter Rice (which Cliff thought was sexy as hell).

“I don’t go to movies to read,” Rick would tease Cliff about his cinephilia. Cliff would just smile at his boss’s teasing, but he always felt proud of himself for reading subtitles. He felt smarter. He liked expanding his mind. He liked the task of grappling with difficult concepts that didn’t present themselves at first. After the first twenty minutes, there was nothing more to learn about a new Rock Hudson or Kirk Douglas movie. But these foreign movies, sometimes you had to watch the whole movie just to know what it was you saw. But he wasn’t buffaloed by them either. They still (one way or another) had to work as a movie , or what was the point? Cliff didn’t know enough to write critical pieces for Films in Review , but he knew enough to know Hiroshima Mon Amour was a piece of crap. He knew enough to know Antonioni was a fraud.

He also liked looking at events from different perspectives. Ballad of a Soldier gave him a respect for his Soviet allies that he never had before. Kanal taught him maybe his wartime experience, compared to some, wasn’t so bad. Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge made him do something he would have thought was impossible: cry for Germans. He usually didn’t share these Sunday afternoons with anybody (Sunday afternoon was his foreign-film day). Nobody else in his circle was interested (it was almost comical how little the stunt community cared about film itself). But Cliff even liked going to these movies by himself. This was his private time with Mifune, Belmondo, Bob the Gambler, and Jean Gabin (both handsome Gabin and shock-white Gabin); this was his time with Akira Kurosawa.

Yojimbo wasn’t the first time Cliff saw a Mifune or a Kurosawa film, having seen Seven Samurai a few years earlier. Cliff thought Seven Samurai was magnificent. He also figured it was a one-off. But the newspaper critics convinced the stuntman to investigate Mifune and Kurosawa’s newest effort. After walking out of the tiny shoebox-sized cinema in an indoor shopping center in Downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo, having just seen Yojimbo , Cliff was sold on Mifune but not yet on Kurosawa. It wasn’t in Cliff’s nature to follow the work of a movie director. He didn’t really hold movies in that high regard. Film directors were guys who shot a schedule. And he ought to know—he worked with enough of them. This idea that they were like some tortured painter who agonized over which shade of blue to put on their canvas was a far-fetched fantasy of what moviemaking was. William Witney busted his ass to get his day done and have good footage at the end of it. But he was hardly a sculptor turning a piece of rock into a woman’s buttocks that you wanted to fondle.