Entertainment Weekly has another one of those Summer photo thingy slideshow things so they can trick you into clicking 20-some times just to get to the latest “Dance Flick,” shot of Marlon Wayans shaking his butt or whatever.
But buried within that slog of stuff we’ve mostly already seen is another shot of Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine, the hillbilly leader of the Jewish soldiers in Quentin Tarantino’s sure-to-be campy and over-the-top WWII saga “Inglourious Basterds.”
“It takes place in WWII, but I’m not sure it’s about WWII,” Pitt said, chuckling to himself on Charlie Rose late last year (and showing off the accent before the trailers came out).
As we wrote in a preview piece about the American characters in the film last year, The Germans nickname him “Aldo the Apache,” for his sick and fucked up decree to collect Nazi scalps, Injun style, from dead German men. In fact, he tells his Basterds they must collect 100 Nazi scalps on their mission or “die trying.” British Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) calls him a “rather gruesome sounding dicky bird.” Raine is a hillbilly redneck from the mountains of Tennessee and is admittedly kind of dumb, but he has his military smarts to be sure. With a visible ropeburn around his neck (which you can totally see in this picture), one must ask: did he survive a lynching of some kind? Nobody knows and no one ever mentions the scar in the script.
‘Basterds’ hits theaters August 21.