Tarantino's WWII revenge fantasy. Christoph Waltz's Hans Landa, the cinema fire, and an alternate-history ending that closes on Hitler's burning face.
1941, occupied France. SS Colonel Hans Landa — the 'Jew Hunter' — arrives at a dairy farmer's house to interrogate him about a Jewish family rumoured to be hiding nearby. The farmer confesses. The family is shot through the floorboards. Only the eldest daughter, Shoshanna, escapes.
Years later, Shoshanna runs a Paris cinema under a false name. A unit of Jewish-American soldiers — the Basterds, led by Lt. Aldo Raine — has been operating behind enemy lines, killing and scalping German soldiers. Both plots converge on a Nazi film premiere at Shoshanna's cinema. Hitler is in the audience. The film closes on the cinema in flames.
Inglourious Basterds opens with a sequence that runs roughly twenty minutes and contains some of the best-staged tension in any Tarantino film. Hans Landa arrives at the LaPadite farm. He sits down. He drinks milk. He talks. He switches languages — from French to English, then later to German. The Jewish family hiding under the floorboards listens to every word.
Christoph Waltz's performance is the architecture of the scene. Landa is genuinely charming, openly performing his charm, and clearly competent enough to have already worked out the answer he's pretending to interrogate his way to. The dread builds entirely from dialogue. By the time the soldiers shoot through the floor, the scene's structural work is already complete. Waltz won Best Supporting Actor at the 2010 Oscars on the basis of essentially this single sequence (he is excellent throughout the film, but the opening is the performance the Academy nominated him for).
Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, like his later Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, ends with an alternate-history sequence that revises real events. In this version, Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and Bormann die in a cinema fire in Paris in June 1944. The film closes on Hitler's face being machine-gunned, then on the cinema's burning screen.
The choice has been debated since the film's release. Critics on one side have argued the ending is morally serious — that cinema is being depicted as a tool of resistance against fascism, and that the alternate history grants Jewish audiences the satisfaction history denied them. Critics on the other side have argued it's a kind of revenge pornography that flattens the actual history of the Holocaust into a stylised set piece. Both readings have textual support. The film is meant to provoke the argument.
Inglourious Basterds is unusual among American studio films of its scale for the amount of subtitled dialogue. Roughly a third of the film is in French, German, or Italian. Tarantino has talked about this as a deliberate choice — most Hollywood WWII films set in Europe have everyone speaking English with accents, which Tarantino considers a kind of cinematic dishonesty.
The choice also generates the film's best running joke: in the basement-tavern sequence, the Basterds' Italian cover identity collapses when their German accents in Italian are too thick to pass. The scene runs eighteen minutes and is the second-best in the film after the farmhouse opening.