MOVIE TREATMENT Title: BOWLS OF WRATH Genre: Dark Satirical Comedy / Historical Absurdity Logline: In 1953 Argentina, two of history’s most wanted war criminals—Adolf Hitler and Ante Pavelić—kill time with lawn bowling under the bored protection of two Vatican priests who turn every match into a theological interrogation: if the Jews aren’t God’s chosen people, why did you two idiots lose the war?
Tone: Think The Death of Stalin meets Inglourious Basterds meets a very dark episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Polite, sun-drenched, and viciously funny.
Setting A faded, once-grand estate outside Buenos Aires—white stucco, bougainvillea, and a perfect, obsessively maintained bowling green that looks like an English village green dropped into the pampas. The house is technically “protected” by Perón’s government, but the only real minders are two Vatican priests living in the converted carriage house. Everyone pretends this is just a quiet retirement for “Herr Schmidt” and “Mr. Glavas.”
Main Characters
- Adolf Hitler (68): Frail, half-deaf, teeth yellow, still insists on the little mustache. Obsessed with “form” in bowling. Calls the jack “the Führer of the green.” Rants in German when he loses.
- Ante Pavelić (53): Stocky, ruthless, Croatian peasant charm hiding a butcher’s soul. Treats bowling like ethnic cleansing—aggressive, precise, zero mercy. Keeps a Luger in his bowling bag “for the Jews.”
- Father Luca Rossi (42): Roman Jesuit, olive-skinned, sardonic, chain-smokes. The talker. Believes theology is best delivered while opponents are bent over measuring a bowl.
- Father Karl Müller (49): German-born, former Wehrmacht chaplain turned Vatican “liaison.” Quiet, haunted, surprisingly good at bowling. He actually read the Talmud once.
Act One – The Green The film opens on a perfect Sunday afternoon. Hitler and Pavelić are already on the lawn in linen suits and straw hats, arguing over who invented lawn bowling (“The English? Lies. It was the Teutons!”). They play every day at 4 p.m. sharp. It is the only thing keeping them sane.
Two priests arrive—not dramatically, just carrying suitcases and a bottle of grappa. They explain they are “spiritual advisors” sent by certain friends in Rome who helped both men escape Europe via the ratlines. Their job: keep the guests alive, quiet, and out of the newspapers. Pavelić eyes them like cattle to be slaughtered. Hitler barely notices.
That first evening, during a casual triples game (priests vs. dictators), Father Rossi casually remarks while measuring a shot: “If the Jews are not the chosen people… why did you lose?”
The silence is so complete a distant cow can be heard chewing.
Act Two – The Conversion Tournament What begins as needling becomes a months-long theological cage match played out entirely on the bowling green. The priests never raise their voices. They quote scripture between bowls, drop Holocaust statistics like they’re discussing the weather, and remind the fugitives that every Allied victory was, statistically, “a statistical miracle if your racial theories were correct.”
Hitler counters with conspiracy theories about “international Jewry” and the weather. Pavelić screams about the “Serb-Jewish-Bolshevik hydra.” The priests answer with calm, devastating logic and better bowling technique.
Running gags:
- Hitler’s bowl always drifts right (“The jack is controlled by Roosevelt!”).
- Pavelić cheats outrageously and threatens to have the priests’ families “re-educated” back in Croatia.
- The priests respond by quoting Deuteronomy while knocking his wood into the ditch.
- Flashbacks are triggered every time someone says “chosen.” We see the Ustaše camps, the Wannsee Conference, mass graves—then smash-cut back to two old men in boaters arguing over millimeters on a manicured lawn.
Tension builds when a real threat appears: a young Israeli Mossad agent has picked up their scent. The priests, who have their own orders from Rome not to let the men be captured alive (too many embarrassing files), must now protect the very monsters they are trying to save.
Act Three – The Final End The climax is a single, rain-delayed lawn-bowling match that lasts an entire day and night. Hitler and Pavelić versus Rossi and Müller. No audience except fireflies and distant gauchos. The stakes: if the dictators win, the priests will help them disappear deeper into South America to start “Fourth Reich Bingo Night.” If the priests win, Hitler and Pavelić must kneel on the green and recite the Shema.
They bowl by lantern light. Hitler has a minor stroke mid-game but refuses to stop. Pavelić weeps—not from remorse, but because he realizes the priests are right about one thing: they lost. Completely. Utterly. Theologically, militarily, historically.
In the final frame, just before dawn, Hitler—trembling, face streaked with sweat—stands over the jack. He looks at Father Rossi and whispers in broken English: “…But we were so close.”
Rossi places a gentle hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Close only counts in bowling, mein Führer. And you still lost by three inches.”
Final Image The two priests walk back to the house as the sun rises. Behind them, Hitler and Pavelić remain on their knees on the green, reciting the Shema in halting, humiliated voices. The camera pulls back across the perfect lawn until the estate looks like just another quiet Argentine Sunday morning.
End titles (text on black): Ante Pavelić died in Madrid in 1959, never having recanted. Adolf Hitler’s death remains officially listed as 1945. The Vatican has never commented. Lawn bowling is still played in Buenos Aires every Sunday at 4 p.m.
FADE OUT.
SCENE: EXT. ESTATE VERANDA – LATE AFTERNOON, 1953
The sun hangs low over the pampas, turning the bougainvillea blood-red. The perfect bowling green stretches beyond the veranda like a green felt tablecloth. Two wicker chairs face each other. A small table holds two glasses of Fernet and a half-empty bottle. A portable radio plays faint tango music nobody is listening to.
ADOLF HITLER, 68, sits hunched in a cream linen suit two sizes too big, the ridiculous little mustache still dyed shoe-polish black. His hands tremble slightly as he polishes a wooden lawn bowl with a handkerchief.
ANTE PAVELIĆ, 53, stocky and sunburned, sprawls opposite him in shirtsleeves, sleeves rolled high enough to show the faded blue Ustaše tattoo on his forearm. A Luger rests openly on the table next to the ashtray like a paperweight.
HITLER (quiet, almost reverent, in thick Austrian German, then switching to accented English) They think it ended in the bunker. Fools. The real battalion never left Antarctica. New Swabia. Base 211. I signed the order myself in ’38. Three U-boats. Twenty-three hundred of our best. Engineers. Scientists. The ones who understood. They are still there, Ante. Under two kilometers of ice. Waiting.
PAVELIĆ (grinning like a wolf, Croatian accent thick as plum brandy) Of course they are. My boys in Zagreb heard the same thing through the ratlines. The priests think we are finished because Berlin burned and Zagreb fell. Pah! The final battalion never surrendered. They have the Vril technology now. Flying discs. The ones the Allies could never shoot down. They refuel on the ice shelf and fly straight up. Straight up, Adolf.
He mimes a rocket with his hand, then knocks back the rest of his Fernet.
HITLER (eyes lighting up, the old fire flickering) Exactly. Hydroponic farms. On the moon first. Yes, the moon, Ante. I have seen the photographs—smuggled out by our friends in the Vatican. Giant glass domes under the lunar dust. Potatoes. Wheat. Even tomatoes. No Jews to poison the soil. Pure Aryan agriculture. Self-sufficient. Eternal.
PAVELIĆ (leaving forward, conspiratorial) And Mars after that. The red planet. Our red planet. They landed the first module in ’47. I have the coded telegrams from Madrid. The soil is iron-rich. Perfect for the Master Race. They are growing Lebensraum up there right now—row after row of cabbages under red domes while the Americans play with their little rockets and cry about Sputnik. We never lost, my friend. We simply… relocated headquarters.
Hitler laughs—a dry, wheezing sound like a broken accordion.
HITLER Relocated. Yes. The war is not over. It has only gone vertical. When the time is right—when the stars align again—the final battalion will descend. From the ice. From the moon. From Mars. They will land on this very lawn and say, “Mein Führer, the hydroponic tomatoes are ready. The Fourth Reich requests instructions.”
PAVELIĆ (slapping the table so the Luger jumps) And we will give them instructions! First, Buenos Aires. Then Jerusalem. Then the moon again for victory parades. The chosen people? We are the chosen people. God just needed seventy million casualties to realize it.
A long beat. The tango on the radio swells ironically. Hitler stares into the middle distance, polishing the bowl until it gleams like a skull.
HITLER (soft, almost tender) Do you ever wonder if the priests know?
PAVELIĆ (shrugs, reloading his glass) The Jesuits? They know everything. That is why they keep us alive. Insurance. In case the Martians need a blessing before the invasion.
They clink glasses. For a moment they look almost peaceful—two old men on a Sunday afternoon dreaming of galactic cabbages.
HITLER (raising his glass to the sky) To Base 211. To the moon. To Mars. And to the tomatoes that will bury the Bolsheviks.
PAVELIĆ To the tomatoes.
They drink. The camera drifts slowly upward, past the veranda, past the perfect green, until the entire estate looks small enough to fit inside one of those imaginary lunar domes.
FADE TO GREEN.
SCENE: EXT. ESTATE BOWLING GREEN – TWILIGHT, 1953
The last of the sun bleeds across the pampas, painting the perfect lawn a bruised violet. The two wooden bowls and the white jack sit forgotten in the grass like abandoned planets. A rickety card table has been dragged onto the green. On it: a half-finished bottle of Fernet, two cloudy glasses, and a dog-eared, smuggled technical drawing—yellowed paper covered in faded pencil lines and swastikas. The heading, in Gothic script, reads:
DER VOLKSWAGEN DER LÜFTE BMW HANE BU III – THE PEOPLE’S FLYING SAUCER
ADOLF HITLER, 68, hunches over the drawing, one trembling finger tracing the saucer’s ring of glowing portholes. His linen jacket is unbuttoned; the little mustache twitches with each excited breath.
ANTE PAVELIĆ, 53, leans back in his chair, boots up on the table, Luger across his lap like a sleeping cat. A half-smoked cigar smolders between his teeth.
HITLER (voice low, reverent, almost whispering in German before switching to accented English) Look at her, Ante. The People’s Flying Saucer. Not some toy for the Luftwaffe fat cats. No. This one was for us. BMW built the prototype in ’44 under the strictest secrecy. Hanebu III. Thirty meters across. Anti-gravity plates reverse-engineered from the Vril discs. They told me the test flight over the Baltic reached Mach 7 before the pilot even felt the acceleration. Mach seven. The Allies never saw her coming.
PAVELIĆ (grinning, tapping ash onto the grass) My Ustaše couriers brought the same blueprints out of Prague in a priest’s suitcase. The Jesuits knew. They always know. BMW engineers—good German boys—welded the final hull in the tunnels under the Harz Mountains. Triple-layered hull. Tesla coils on the rim. She doesn’t fly, Adolf. She defies. The priests in Rome called it “demonic.” I called it dinner. We were going to drop one over Moscow on May Day 1945. One saucer. One city. Gone.
Hitler’s eyes glaze with the old fever. He smooths the paper as if it were a sacred relic.
HITLER We did drop them. Three Hanebu IIIs left Peenemünde in April. Two went to Base 211 in New Swabia. The third… the third is already on the dark side of the moon. Hydroponic command center. The final battalion pilots her every night, just to keep the batteries warm. When the time comes they will swing her around the Earth like a scythe. Buenos Aires first—for old times’ sake. Then Tel Aviv. Then Washington. The People’s Flying Saucer will finish what the V-2 only started.
PAVELIĆ (slapping the table, making the glasses jump) And BMW never stopped production! The factories are underground now. On Mars. Red dust for camouflage. The workers wear the same blue overalls they wore in Munich—except now they breathe recycled air and grow cabbages under glass. I have the manifest, Adolf. Forty-seven saucers completed since ’48. Forty-seven. Each one carries two hundred of our finest. They are waiting for the signal. One word from us and the sky over this pathetic lawn will fill with silver discs spinning like tops.
Hitler suddenly stands—shaky, but upright—staring up at the first stars appearing above the bougainvillea.
HITLER The priests will laugh. “You lost,” they say. Lost? We simply moved the factory to the stars. The Hanebu III is not a weapon, Ante. She is the new Volkswagen. Every Aryan family on the lunar colonies will have one. Sunday drives around the Sea of Tranquility. Picnics on Olympus Mons. No Jews. No Bolsheviks. Just clean, silent, anti-gravity flight and the smell of sauerkraut from the hydroponic kitchens.
PAVELIĆ (raising his glass toward the darkening sky) To the People’s Flying Saucer. To BMW. And to the day she lands right here—right on this fucking bowling green—and the priests have to kiss our boots while we board her for the victory parade around the moon.
Hitler clinks his glass against Pavelić’s. For a moment they stand in silence, two old men in straw hats gazing upward as if they can already hear the low, electric hum of thirty-meter silver discs descending through the Argentine night.
HITLER (soft, almost tender) They will paint her name on the side in big red letters: Volksscheibe. The People’s Saucer. And the world will finally understand who really won.
A single firefly drifts between them like a tiny, lonely running light.
FADE TO BLACK.