There are movies that work best the first time you watch them, and there are movies that work best upon repeat viewings. We tend to think that if a movie is any good it will hold up when you rewatch it, and that’s true to some extent. But certain movies hold you like putty in their hands the first time you watch them, playing with your expectations and delightfully revealing just the right information at just the right time. If it’s a quality movie, it will still be fun to revisit after you know what’s up its sleeve, but that first viewing gives you the intended experience, and you’ll never get it again.
Inglourious Basterds is one of those movies that works best the first time you see it. If you haven’t seen it, for the love of God, please stop reading. Have your first viewing as soon as you can, and it will be a treat. But if you’ve seen it already, if, like me, you’ve seen it half a dozen times or more, allow me to remind you what it’s like to see Inglourious Basterds for the first time.
We meet Monsieur LaPadite (Denis Ménochet) and Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) as they have an extended conversation at LaPadite’s house. We don’t know either of them, but LaPadite seems very nervous and Landa seems very congenial and verbose. The movie gradually, ever so gradually, gives us more hints about Landa’s reputation and the missing Jewish Dreyfuss family, until halfway through the scene, we pan down from LaPadite’s head to his toes, then past the floor to reveal the Dreyfuss family under the floorboards. Finally we know the stakes of the conversation.
But we don’t know everything yet—Landa is still insisting that the interview is a formality. It is only when he launches into a diatribe about Jewish people being like rats that we begin to suspect that he may have the upper hand. We don’t know yet how clever Landa is, so we are shocked to learn that his congeniality was a ruse. He sent LaPadite’s family out of the room so he could pretend to invite them back in—but instead he invites soldiers to the house to massacre the Dreyfusses. He had switched the conversation from French, which he pretended not to speak well, to English so that he could extract LaPadite’s confession without alerting the Dreyfusses. LaPadite has been tricked, and so have we.
But that isn’t the last time that Quentin Tarantino will have us in the palm of his hand. When Lieutenant Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and two of the Basterds go to meet Brigitte Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) in a basement bar, we are warned that they are in trouble. When we see that the bar is full of Nazis, our blood pressure rises. For twenty minutes, it will not fall again. First, Hicox is confronted by a sergeant, and then a major, who says his accent sounds odd. He manages to lie convincingly with his knowledge of German film history (big deal, I also have seen the films of G.W. Pabst). The tension stays in the air while the major plays a game with the table, until Hicox gives himself away with a hand gesture. The tension reaches a boil and explodes in gunfire. The ebb and flow of danger is masterfully executed.
The coup de gras of Inglourious Basterds’ various suspenses and surprises is that the foolhardy Operation Kino turns out to be a success. It wouldn’t cross your mind that a writer would change how Hitler dies for the sake of his movie, until Tarantino does it. It makes you take it as a given that Operation Kino and Shosanna’s plan will both fail, until the very moment when they both succeed. This revisionism isn’t really wishcasting for a better history—would it really have mattered if Hitler had died in Operation Kino in 1945 instead of by suicide? Presumably, the Holocaust still occurred, and six million Jews have been killed. But it matters for these characters to triumph in Tarantino’s world, and it matters that we are surprised—and thrilled, in a movie that has no shortage of surprises and thrills. Let’s not forget what it was like to experience them for the first time.
