Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood serves a double purpose for its writer-director in terms of moviemaking and history. Firstly, it’s part of a series of movies that began with Inglorious Basterds, in which Tarantino seeks to rewrite history in favor of specific victims, in his own inimitable style of genre filmmaking. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Tarantino’s love letter to Tinseltown. As such, it’s peppered with references to some of Hollywood’s most venerated movies.

Set in 1969, Tarantino’s pseudo-historical epic focuses on the cinematic history of the 1960s. At the time, Hollywood’s Golden Age was coming to an end; New Hollywood was on the horizon, being propelled forward by auteur directors like Sharon Tate’s husband Roman Polanski, and movie subgenres such as the spaghetti Western had recently come into being. While Once Upon a Time in Hollywood necessarily aims its lens at the film industry of its setting, Tarantino still has time to work in a few older movie references while he’s at it.

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The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Falcon Statuette At Bookstore

John Huston’s seminal film noir The Maltese Falcon gets a knowing wink from Tarantino in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, during a scene in which Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate enters a Los Angeles bookstore. In the store, there’s a replica of the falcon statuette that serves as the motive driving Humphrey Bogart’s private investigator Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. In case any fans of Huston’s movie miss the statuette, Tate bends down, admires the statue, and strokes its head when she walks into the bookstore. The reference is over in a flash, but it’s unmistakable.

11

The Big Sleep (1946)

Sharon Tate Entering The Bookstore

Another one of Humphrey Bogart’s classic film noir movies is referenced in the same bookstore scene of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In fact, the whole point of Sharon Tate entering an LA bookstore is to emulate Bogart’s character Philip Marlowe, in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep.

Tarantino’s bookstore scene is a sH๏τ-for-sH๏τ recreation of Bogart’s walk across a busy street and into the Acme Book Shop in The Big Sleep, from the direction the camera faces when Robbie’s character crosses the road to the side of the screen from which she enters the store. Viewers not familiar with Bogart’s hard-boiled detective characters might wonder what the purpose of this scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood actually is, but Tarantino includes these references all the same, for his own amusement as well as the enjoyment of noir fans.

10

White Heat (1949)

Cliff Arrives At The Drive-In

Not content with including two nods to film noir in a single scene, Tarantino makes further reference to the genre with a sH๏τ of Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth entering a movie drive-in. This sH๏τ is lifted from Raoul Walsh’s White Heat, in which James Cagney’s gangster Arthur “Cody” Jarret stops over at a drive-in theater during a police chase. Tarantino recreates the feel of the scene, down to the neon lighting of the drive-in sign. The difference is that Cliff Booth actually lives behind the drive-in theater in a trailer, an interesting representation of the position of a stuntman in the movie industry.

9

Giant (1956)

Jett Rink Mural

The 1956 Western movie Giant, directed by George Stevens, is one of just three feature films to have starred actor James Dean. There’s a mural of the movie, paying homage to Dean’s character Jett Rink, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. This mural appears briefly in Tarantino’s picture, on a wall next to which some of the young women in Charles Manson’s so-called family are dumpster diving. Dean was a highly mythologized figure in Hollywood by the 1960s, owing to his premature death as well as the power of his cinematic performances.

8

The Great Escape (1963)

Rick Dalton’s Missed Career Opportunity

The Great Escape is one of the movies most prominently referenced in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, as an entire subplot revolves around the 1963 war epic. Leonardo DiCaprio’s protagonist Rick Dalton claims to have narrowly missed out on the part of Captain Virgil Hilts in the movie, which in reality went to Steve McQueen.

Tarantino actually goes as far as incorporating a scene from The Great Escape film itself into his movie, with DiCaprio’s Dalton inserted into one of McQueen’s most iconic roles. The director was clearly having a blast utilizing the modern filmmaking techniques at his disposal to explore classic cinema.

7

Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy (1964-1966)

Rick’s Career Trajectory Mirrors Western’s Greatest

Although Sergio Leone’s movies are never directly referenced in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it’s clear that a whole storyline in the film is meant as a homage to the spaghetti Western genre. More specifically, Rick being hired by Sergio Corbucci for his upcoming movie being sH๏τ in Italy following a stint on an ailing TV Western mirrors the story of Clint Eastwood being hired by Leone for A Fistful of Dollars, the first movie of Leone’s Dollars trilogy, in 1964.

There are also obvious similarities between Dalton’s story and that of Burt Reynolds, a friend of Eastwood who was hired by Corbucci to appear in his 1966 Navajo Joe, immediately after appearing in the Western TV show Gunsmoke. Like Dalton, Reynolds traveled to Italy to shoot the movie, whereas Leone took Eastwood to Spain for the production of the Dollars trilogy.

6

The Green Hornet (2011)

Based On The 1966-1967 TV Show

Another major Hollywood star of the 1960s actually makes an appearance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Bruce Lee is played by Mike Moh in Tarantino’s movie and is a loudmouth primadonna who believes he can take down just about anyone in hand-to-hand combat. He challenges Cliff to a fight, in which Booth puts Lee in his place.

This incident is based on the story of stuntman Gene LeBell, who allegedly lifted Lee up in a headlock after the actor beat someone else up on the set of the 1960s action show The Green Hornet (via South China Morning Post). Different sources tell different versions of LeBell’s story, but something went down between him and Lee, which inspired Tarantino’s version of the event. More recently, in 2011, The Green Hornet was turned into a modestly-rated movie by Michel Gondry.

5

Valley Of The Dolls (1967)

Sharon Tate’s Breakout Role

Valley of the Dolls was Sharon Tate’s first major success in Hollywood, with the actress playing a leading role on the big screen for the first time at the age of 24. The movie is only mentioned briefly in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by the teller at the box office when Tate tells them who she is. However, the historical significance of this reference can’t be understated.

Less than a year after Tate was murdered by the Manson Family, a sequel to Valley of the Dolls was released called Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which ends in a scene of drug-fueled violence inspired by her untimely death. While Valley of the Dolls represented the height of the Swingin’ Sixties, full of luxuriant excess, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls portrayed the violent destruction of this lifestyle, reflecting the real-life crimes of Manson and his followers.

4

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

An Illuminated Billboard Calls Attention To Kubrick’s Masterpiece

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most important films ever made, a futuristic sci-fi epic that meditates on the entire history of human civilization, as well as the role of automation in the progress of our species. The movie’s staggering visuals and prescient use and depiction of technology changed cinema forever. It’s only fitting, then, that it should be referenced in a love letter to Hollywood that’s set in the home of American cinema just a year after 2001: A Space Odyssey was released.

In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino places the advert for Kubrick’s movie on an illuminated billboard above the entrance of the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills. Blink and you’ll miss it, but the director just manages to squeeze arguably the greatest movie of the 1960s into his big-screen time capsule.

3

Targets (1968)

A Trailer For Targets Lets Us Know New Hollywood Is Coming

2001: A Space Odyssey might have been the most important movie of 1968, but few other тιтles epitomized that year in film quite like Peter Bogdanovich’s crime thriller Targets. The movie was one of the first to signal the birth of New Hollywood, with its young director hailed as a genius by his peers, containing key elements of the genre revival that would later become known as neo-noir. We see a sH๏τ of the trailer for this movie behind the screen of the drive-in theater that Cliff lives next to. It is a sign of things to come, the harbinger of a new age for American cinema.

2

The Wrecking Crew (1968)

Margot Robbie Goes To See Sharon Tate’s Last Movie

The Wrecking Crew, meanwhile, is a throwback to the kind of campy and exaggerated screwball comedies that would disappear towards the end of the 1960s. It was one of Sharon Tate’s last movies released during her lifetime, so it makes sense that this is the film she goes to watch herself in during the movie theater scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

This happy, carefree scene is underscored with a certain tragic sense of dramatic irony, as anyone who knows the story of the Manson Murders realizes that things didn’t really turn out as Tarantino wills them to at the end of the movie. Tate was viciously cut down in her prime and had so much more to give than throwaway films like The Wrecking Crew.

1

Django Unchained (2012)

Tarantino Reused The Set Of Another Hit

Inevitably, as with almost any Tarantino movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is chock-full of references to the director’s own filmography. Perhaps the most impressive of these references is the set for “Bounty Law,” Rick Dalton’s Western TV show in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is actually a real film set used for one of Tarantino’s previous projects.

In his 2012 exploitation Western Django Unchained, Tarantino used the same set, which is Melody Ranch in Newhall, California. How deliberate the director’s meta-reference to this scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood actually is, only he will know. Either way, Tarantino packed an extraordinary number of cinematic references into his 2019 movie, with the affection and attention to detail of a Hollywood historian.

Source: South China Morning Post