Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a Tennessee hillbilly, assembles a squad of eight Jewish-American soldiers. Their mission: kill Nazis in occupied France, and each surviving member must scalp one fallen enemy. Raine demands 100 Nazi scalps from each man.
Introduction Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a masterpiece of revisionist history, linguistic tension, and cathartic violence. Released in 2009, the film is neither a war epic in the traditional sense (no sprawling battles) nor a straightforward thriller. Instead, it is a carefully constructed fairy tale—one where the oppressed rewrite their own ending, using scalpels, baseball bats, and nitrate film stock. Divided into five chapters, the film weaves together two parallel plots: a young Jewish cinema owner’s plan to incinerate the Nazi high command, and a squad of Jewish-American soldiers on a brutal mission of psychological warfare. The result is Tarantino’s most morally complex and narratively disciplined film. Plot Summary Chapter One: “Once Upon a Time... in Nazi-Occupied France” In 1941, SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), known as “The Jew Hunter,” visits a remote dairy farmer, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Ménochet). With chilling politeness, Landa interrogates LaPadite, eventually coercing him into revealing that a Jewish family—the Dreyfuses—is hiding beneath his floorboards. Landa orders his men to fire through the floorboards. Only one member escapes: Shosanna Dreyfuss (Mélanie Laurent). inglourious basterds 2009
The Basterds, now joined by British Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and German actress-turned-spy Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), plan to infiltrate the premiere. Their mission: blow up the cinema. The plan goes disastrously wrong in a basement tavern, where a tense game of “Mexican standoff” ends in a bloody shootout. Only Raine and the German-speaking Basterd Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) survive, along with von Hammersmark (wounded). Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a Tennessee hillbilly,
By 1944, Shosanna has assumed a new identity as “Emmanuelle Mimieux” and owns a small cinema in Paris. She catches the attention of Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a German war hero sniper who stars in a Nazi propaganda film, Nation’s Pride . Zoller arranges for the film’s premiere to be held at Shosanna’s cinema, attended by Goebbels, Göring, and Hitler himself. Shosanna sees her chance for revenge. Divided into five chapters, the film weaves together