I’ve admitted in the past that I missed an obvious plot point in Pulp Fiction and now it looks like Quentin Tarantino has whooshed me again.
I saw Inglourious Basterds yesterday. The Basterds started out with Lt Aldo Raine and his eight Jewish soldiers. They recruited Sgt Stiglitz so there were ten men altogether.
Now in the barroom scene we saw Stiglitz and Wicki get killed (along with Hicox). Following this we saw Raine, Donny, and Omar infiltrated the theatre. Then we saw Raine captured with Utivich.
What happened to the other four Basterds? Was there a mention of them being killed that I missed? Were they already dead before the final mission or were they killed at some point during it?
No, I figured the scene where Landa decided not to shoot Shosanna in 1941 was an intentional mystery. (My theory is that this was to show that Landa viewed hunting Jews as a theoretical game and didn’t really care whether his targets lived or died. In his view, he had won once he had Shosanna in his gunsight and there was no additional point in actually shooting her.)
My guess on the missing Basterds is that they died in some scene that didn’t make the final cut. Tarantino’s original script was apparently much longer and a lot was cut out. I can surmise that there was a battle scene where half the group was killed.
In terms of the missing story, I’m more curious about Shosanna’s “aunt” - the one who Shosanna supposedly inherited the theatre from. Scenes with the aunt were apparently filmed and Maggie Cheung played the aunt. That’s an unusual casting and I feel we missed an interesting backstory.
If I remember correctly, she plays a relative (aunt, mother, grandmother?) of the Bear Jew, who along with all the other Jews in the neighborhood sign his baseball bat, adding significance to the later scene.