Tarantino isn’t trying to play here what another novelist/screenwriter, Terry Southern, liked to call the Quality Lit Game.
He’s here to tell a story, in take-it-or-leave-it Elmore Leonard fashion, and to make room along the way to talk about some of the things he cares about — old movies, male camaraderie, revenge and redemption, music and style.
Now he becomes “a folkloric hero of Nixon’s ‘silent majority’” and a regular on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” Yet, from his acting career, he remembers every misstep, every mortification, every slight.
In World War II, we learn, he killed more Japanese than any other American soldier, and earned the Medal of Valor twice.
If you want to know what killing a man feels like, without actually killing a man, Booth tells Dalton, grab a pig from behind and stick a knife into its throat.
There’s good writing here about acting, about foreign films, about B movies, about early movie sex scenes and about television action directors.
Booth is a fan of the actor Alan Ladd, for example, because: “When Ladd got mad in a movie, he didn’t act mad.
Booth saved him from an on-set fire, telling him: “Rick, you’re standing in a puddle of water.
In the film, that plot point is left hanging and has been much debated.
Tired of being belittled, Booth impulsively shoots his bikini-wearing wife with a spear gun, which essentially tears her in half.