The Whole Bloody Affair’ Is Quentin Tarantino’s Best Movie

In the age of streaming, there’s a widespread belief that every movie is available, all the time, everywhere. Don’t fall for it! Some of the greatest movies ever made are nowhere to be found due to everything from music rights snafus to corporate negligence. In this column, we take a look at films currently out of print on physical media and unavailable on any streaming platform in an effort to draw attention to them and say to their rights holders, “Release This!”

This week, Los Angeles moviegoers can see Quentin Tarantino‘s “Kill Bill” saga as he originally intended — not split up into two normal feature-length movies, but as one gargantuan 258-minute epic at Tarantino’s own Vista Theater in Hollywood. It’s an opportunity that should not be missed, for a couple of reasons. First, because “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” has never been released on physical media or any streaming platform; second, because viewed together, and with the subtle changes Tarantino made to the domestic theatrical cuts, this “Kill Bill” is arguably the greatest movie Tarantino ever made. It’s arguably the greatest movie anybody ever made.

If “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” isn’t the greatest movie ever made, it’s certainly the most movie ever made, an exhilarating blend of Western, martial arts epic, and revenge thriller that’s also far more than the genre pastiche that description implies. While Tarantino riffs on and alludes to dozens — maybe hundreds — of movies ranging from the obvious Asian action and B-Western influences to totems of the New Hollywood like “The Last Picture Show” and Walter Hill’s “The Driver,” he’s not engaging in mere homage or imitation. He comes at the conventions and the archetypes from the inside out, investing characters and situations we’ve seen before (and plenty that we haven’t) with a critical eye and emotional depth that allows him to improve on virtually every film he’s referencing.

It’s similar to what Sergio Leone did in “Once Upon a Time in the West” and “Once Upon a Time in America,” films that took the most basic, familiar elements of Hollywood genre movies and breathed new life into them by treating them as if they were based in lived experience. The basic premise of “Kill Bill” can be described in one sentence without leaving out anything too important: a former assassin (Uma Thurman) left for dead on her wedding day wakes up from a coma and goes on a killing spree to wreak vengeance upon the former colleagues — and the lover — who wronged her. Yet while the concept is straightforward, the execution is remarkably complex. Tarantino spends over four hours teasing out every narrative, stylistic, and philosophical possibility raised by the premise before he strips it all back down again at the end and reveals the movie was about something simple — a mother getting back to her daughter — after all.

“Kill Bill” is episodic in its structure, with sections devoted to each of the Bride’s targets as well as some relevant flashbacks, and breaking the story up into chapters (a conceit Tarantino would return to in “Inglorious Basterds” and “The Hateful Eight”) allows him to create several self-contained mini-movies connected to the whole. There’s an anime segment, contemporary spins on the Western and Wuxia genres, and so on. The film’s final chapter even becomes a meditation on toxic relationships in the tradition of Ingmar Bergman, whose grim 1976 melodrama “Face to Face” provides the chapter’s title.

The episodic structure provided an easy fix for Tarantino in 2003, when it became clear that releasing “Kill Bill” as a single film would be commercially inadvisable. Rather than cut the material down to a manageable length, he simply broke the movie in two and ended “Volume One” after the “Chapter 5: Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves” sequence, which provided a spectacular fight scene as the climax. “Kill Bill: Volume 1” was released in the fall of 2003, providing the audience with the first five chapters, and “Kill Bill: Volume 2” followed six months later, unveiling the subsequent five chapters.

Both versions work well in this format, especially since there’s a sort of shift in the Bride’s character that occurs at the beginning of the second half; she’s more intense and vengeful in “Volume 1,” softer, more contemplative, and tragic in “Volume 2” (despite plucking an opponent’s eye out with her bare hand). Personally, I never had any problem with viewing the story as two movies, and like many viewers, occasionally watched them consecutively at home in an effort to approximate seeing them as one uninterrupted epic.

The key word there is “approximate,” however, because to watch “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and “Kill Bill: Volume 2” back to back does not precisely replicate the experience that “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” provides. The differences between the theatrical releases that came out in 2003 and 2004 and the “Bloody Affair” cut that Tarantino presented at Cannes in 2006 are, in many ways, minor. They’re also case studies in how a few small changes can drastically change the entire trajectory of a work of art in a way that transforms its meanings and effects.

The key change comes at the end of Chapter 5, right before the end of “Volume 1” and right before the intermission in “The Whole Bloody Affair.” [Warning: Spoilers to follow.] In both versions, the chapter ends with the Bride letting her mutilated enemy Sofie Fatale live so that she can report back to Bill (David Carradine) about what the Bride has done and planned. In “Volume 1,” however, the scene ends with Bill asking Sofie if the Bride knows the daughter she was pregnant with when she was shot is still alive. “The Whole Bloody Affair” omits this piece of information, ending simply with the Bride vowing to kill everyone on her list.

Losing this one short piece of dialogue has ramifications that reverberate throughout the remainder of “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” and give its final chapter an emotional impact more shattering than in the theatrical release. In the two-part version of “Kill Bill,” we as audience members have a piece of information that the Bride does not throughout most of “Volume 2”: that the daughter she thinks is dead is still alive. This creates a slight distancing effect that’s not there in “The Whole Bloody Affair,” where the audience discovers the Bride’s daughter is alive at the exact same moment she does — making for a more affecting reveal that leaves us as shaken as the Bride is for the rest of the film.

The change also amplifies what is already unique about “Kill Bill” in Tarantino’s oeuvre, which is its essentially single point of view. Tarantino has generally favored the ensemble ever since “Reservoir Dogs,” and one of the pleasures of his work is the way he weaves multi-character narratives into complex tapestries that let subplots diverge and come back together in unpredictable and endlessly fascinating ways.

“Kill Bill” is certainly no exception to this rule with its deep cast of colorful characters, but it marries itself to one character’s perspective more than any other Tarantino movie. (One chapter is even titled “Elle and I,” as if to indicate that this is a first-person narrative being written by the Bride). This is intensified in the “Whole Bloody Affair” cut, where we no longer get ahead of the Bride — we share her sense of pain and loss at every step, and her combination of bewilderment, relief, exaltation, and shock when she lays eyes on her daughter for the first time.

It adds depth to the already all-time great climax between the Bride and Bill, where we get a fuller sense of the depth of Bill’s (and, to a certain extent, the Bride’s) cruelty, the depth of his and the Bride’s love for each other, and the rich irony that the cruelty and love not only coexist but are inextricable (this is where Tarantino really earns the Bergman comparison). After the Bride kills Bill and absconds with her daughter to a hotel room, the release she feels as she cries on the bathroom floor is ours, too, in a scene filled with so many roiling emotions that it should put to rest once and for all the idiotic notion that Tarantino is just a director who makes movies about other movies.

Obviously, he does that too — Tarantino has often said that if he hadn’t become a director, he probably would have been a film critic. “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” has a whole parallel track alongside its emotional arc where the filmmaker recreates, examines, and comments upon genre touchstones — but as Jean-Luc Godard once said, it’s not where you take ideas from, it’s where you take them to, and in “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair,” Tarantino creates an epic unlike any other.

It’s also an epic that has been nearly impossible to see in its proper form in the 19 years since Tarantino premiered it at Cannes. It’s currently enjoying a limited run at Tarantino’s Vista in Hollywood, and the only other times it has screened since 2006 have been a handful of bookings at Tarantino’s other venue, the New Beverly Cinema. While the rarity of these screenings undoubtedly makes “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” something extra special for those of us who have gotten to see it, one also hopes that someday it will see the light of day as a streaming or physical media release.

At this point by my count, there have been over a dozen different pressings of “Pulp Fiction” on Laserdisc, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K UHD — can’t we get at least one of “The Whole Bloody Affair”?

“Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” plays at the Vista Theater in Hollywood through July 28.