Perhaps you’re just looking for an excuse, I heard hardly any complaint about the subtitles.
I didn’t mean in this thread. I have heard it other places.
His motives for his actions are not entirely clear. One thing that is not unclear is that he knew. Lets say you are him, and you want to signal that you know who she is, without actually telling her. How would you go about this? Perhaps casually mentioning the name of the place she came from. Or perhaps, if you were feeling clever, order a drink that is associated with that place, but would never coincidentally be ordered in that situation. If he didn’t know, it’s a totally odd coincidence, requiring horrible writing.
So we have to think of what reasons he could have for not outing her. I can think of a number of factors, there are probably more.
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I think that he doesn’t actually believe that it is a rational conclusion to kill the Jews. This is shown in his speech in the first scene. My theory is that he puts such good effort into finding and executing Jews is not because of the Jews themselves, but because he is good at it, and he likes being good at things.
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He doesn’t sense any risk or even consider that she would try to kill anybody.
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If he outed her, then he would ruin the evening for the involved high nazis.
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I don’t think outing her would necessarily bring more glory to himself. Yes, he would catch another one. But he would also have to admit that she escaped him once. Possibly there would even be trouble with the paper trail, since he might have written “no survivors” from the incident.
But perhaps I have overestimated it. If so, I retract my comment.
You mean Boston.
Sorry, but I disagree. It’s milk, a common beverage then. What the deal was is that she knew, and he didn’t but the milk made it extra horrible for her, as she was both reminded of that day, and she then thought he was playing with her.
It is unclear that he knew.
Thanks, I obviously agree. The milk was a small chatty detail in the opening scene of the film, and when you watch her face it’s clear that it’s horrible for her - he’s oblivious. I guess people would be making the same argument if he later smoked his giant calabash pipe in front of her too.
His expressions never gave away what he knew. This is apparent in several other scenes.
And obviously those two things would not be the same. Her hiding place is closely associated to the milk, whereas the pipe isn’t.
Try and consider how bad writing it would be if he didn’t know. It works against the character they build up, since he is shown as knowing most things. It confuses people, since many will naturally assume he also knows this, which has a lot of implications for his character. And it supposes a big coincidence just for a cheap thrill. Even in TV I would consider this bad writing, and Tarantino worked on this script for 8 years.
He never sees her under the floor boards.
It’s like asserting that Grand Moff Tarkin recognizes Han Solo because he was in his trash compactor.
I don’t think him personally seeing her is very significant.
The guy’s a detective and supposedly a good one. He’s in charge of security for this event. He’d have no doubt investigated this new cinema owner before the meeting (remember that his mode of operation is, like a good cross-examiner, to always know the answer before asking the question). He doesn’t need to rely on anything so crude as personally recognizing someone’s face.
Why did he not just arrest her? Because he’s a sadist. He enjoys playing with people. He can always arrest her later; he likes watching her twist in the wind while he “coincidentally” orders milk and “forgets” to ask significant questions. Only, the plot to extract himself from the sinking Nazi ship intervenes, so he never gets the chance to end his game.
We don’t know that he’s never seen a photo of her. He did seem to have some sort of file there in the farmhouse. The opening scene was the only “interaction” we saw. Who knows what else went on between times, or even before.
We are led to believe that the Dreyfuses don’t speak English, but when Shoshana makes her movie she speaks English. I think it was her knowing English that saved her life at the farmhouse. I am undecided if Landa knew her at the restaurant.
If he remembered her at the restaurant, then he must have remembered murdering her family in cold blood. I doubt he’d put the german elite AND his own life in her hands. He asked her questions about how she came to own the cimema and about her aunt and uncle from whom she inherited it.
He seemed satisfied with her answers.
I think the milk order was to ante up the tension.
Landa was a busy hunter before the start of the movie, and he may have drank milk at every house he encountered. Therefore, any Jew that escaped him as Shoshana did would know he’s a milk drinker.
I don’t think Landa drank milk because he thought Emmanuelle was Shoshana Dreyfus. But after her reaction, I think he knew she was an escaped Jew.
You forget that Shoshana was from an area with dairy farmers. And from the last family from that area.
I was kind of disappointed by the movie because as a Jew myself, I was hoping there would be more focus on the Basterds. I expected it to be sort of a Jewish version of “The Dirty Dozen,” but instead the main focus was on the evil Nazis and the Femme Fatale. The Basterds were practically a nonentity compared to the amount of screen time everyone else got (and the toughest guy in the Basterds, Til Schweiger’s character, wasn’t even Jewish, which irked me. It was like if they made a movie about the Tuskeegee Airmen but the best pilot in the squad was played by Matthew Modine.)
Despite this, the movie did manage to hold my attention all the way through, which is a genuine rarity for me. And half the time, I forgot that there were even subtitles.
The femme fatale was Jewish too.
Haha. Nice.
Yeah, I was a little miffed that the ads sold me a balls-to-the-wall commando flick directed by Tarantino, and the film was a disjointed thriller - but I still dug it.
To me that was kind of the point. The movie is about propaganda, about the alternate reality of movies versus the flat actuality of history. In many ways the movie is about how we want to see the Basterds kick Nazi ass but instead we get other things- a british spy romp, a farce, a suspense-of-manners thriller, etc. The audience’s reaction to each of these (including the regret at not actually being satisfied with the Dirty Dozen premise) is part of the experience of the movie. We pretty quickly get fleshed out nazi characters that are not entirely unambiguously evil, for example the officer who is killed by the Bear Jew early in the film, or Zoller, who is clearly conflicted about his exploits which are celebrated in the ridiculous propaganda film.
The implausibility of both plans- the Basterds’ brutishly violent one, and Shoshanna’s elegant romantic one- is part of the whole fantasy. The audience at the end is supposed to feel commonalities with the nazi audience in Shoshanna’s theater- cheering for blood. Landa. the villain, gets off relatively easy. And of course we all know that Hitler did not die as depicted in the movie.
It’s a great movie while being watched, but I think it settles in deeper than that, and makes me think about why we watch Tarantino, or movies in general. I think that is intentional (and that the marketing of the movie is intentionally a little misleading in order to generate this effect).