Hellstrom's King Kong theory is Tarantino's own from Fresh Air; the opening title card is Tarantino's handwriting; the screenplay sets Aldo's briefing in England and explains his neck scar as a survived lynching; Donny Donowitz is the father of True Romance's Lee Donowitz and Aldo is suggested as Floyd's great-grandfather; Eli Roth directed Nation's Pride; the marquee film is Clouzot's Le Corbeau; Zoller is based on Audie Murphy; Goebbels's Lilian Harvey tantrum reflects her 1939 flight from Germany; Landa's rat speech draws on The Eternal Jew; von Hammersmark is based partly on Zarah Leander; Tarantino said discovering Waltz gave him his movie; Hickox quotes Cole Porter and Villon
Hellstrom's King Kong theory is Tarantino's own from his Terry Gross interview, and the opening title card is in Tarantino's handwriting; the screenplay reveals that the 'I want my scalps' briefing takes place in England and that the ligature marks on Aldo's neck come from a survived lynching, a common punishment in the 20s and 30s, which also references Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Lee Donowitz and Donnie Donowitz are related, and Aldo is assumed or suggested to be the great-grandfather of Floyd from True Romance; Eli Roth, the horror director of Hostel, directed Nation's Pride, the film within the film.
The movie Shoshana takes down off the marquee is Henri-Georges Clouseau's (as transcribed) Le Corbeau, a famous 40s French film with hidden anti-Nazi messages; the Audie Murphy basis for Zoller is a clever subversion of the American ideal of heroism applied to a German soldier.
Goebbels throws a tantrum at Francesca's mention of Lillian Harvey because Harvey fled Nazi Germany in 1939 after helping the Jewish choreographer Jens Keith escape to Switzerland; Landa's rats speech to the farmer is influenced by The Eternal Jew, an SS propaganda film made in Poland that depicted Jews as disease-spreading rats; Hammersmark is based somewhat on Zara Leander (as transcribed), a Swedish actress said to have been a Russian spy; this is less half-assed research than World War II history.
Tarantino has said that discovering Waltz gave him his movie, since he had come to fear the role was literally unplayable, and he was resistant to Leo speaking English with a German accent for two and a half hours.
Hickox is literate and literary: 'Paris when it sizzles' is a lyric from a Cole Porter song, and 'like the snows of yesteryear' comes from a Villon poem (attributed in the episode to Jacques Villon), heady stuff for a Tarantino movie that still feels true to the character.
Earlier, during the tavern discussion, a host borrows a piece of half-assed research: the King Kong scene is Tarantino's theory from Fresh Air, and his Top Gun theory would have been anachronistic.
The award is named for Saul Rubinek's turn as the movie producer Lee Donowitz in True Romance, so Eli Roth not only overacts here but has to win, because he plays Lee Donowitz's father; the family relationships between Tarantino characters are saved for internet research, and Sylvester Groth's case is denied under the bylaws of the Rewatchables.
Every Roth line reading, like 'fuck a duck', is goofy, though the way Groth begins to weep in the theater after Hitler's praise of Nation's Pride has stuck with a host, and the two could flip-flop between the two acting awards.
The award is tough this time: Eli Roth is up there; Fassbender may not count because he does a lot of screen time within a little; Mike Myers does not necessarily do a lot with a little; Rod Taylor as Churchill just says 'brief him'; all were great.
Alexander Felling (as transcribed) as Wilhelm, Maximilian's dad, carries a crucial moment and is very good; one pick is Eli Roth, Diehl as Hellstrom is floated as a possible vote, and another votes Roth while allowing you could go a couple of ways.
Sylvester Groth as Goebbels also does a lot with a little; a host has Roth winning another category later and bumps that category up next.
Eli Roth's feel for the game of baseball: not a bad swing, but he seems to have learned the baseball vocabulary phonetically with no grasp of who Teddy Williams was or where Lansdowne Street is, and he reads as a New Yorker rather than a Boston guy.
The clear winner or loser for one host is Fassbender being in only two scenes; he is such a dynamo that it feels misremembered, but he does not appear until the 50th minute and is in it for about 17 minutes, every second electric, and it is ballsy and disciplined of Tarantino to kill him off so soon after introducing him, though a host would watch 97 hours of him getting whiskey out of a globe and wishes the two would work together again, since Fassbender could use it.
Regardless of Donnie Donowitz's origins, Ted Williams in 1941 hit .406 with a .553 on-base and .737 slugging, an OPS of 1.287 (transcribed as 1287), in what is thought to be his last season before enlisting; Mike Trout can eat shit.
Asked by name for more, the host has little, is not interested in whether Quentin could have made the movie, and finds nothing that makes him want it to stop, but the Cat People scene is too anachronistic, with David Bowie's voice distracting in an otherwise consistent tone, even if the operatic, expressionistic German style it reaches for is understood. — Sean Fennessey
Bowie may connect to Pabst and the artistic flourishing of 1920s Germany before the Reich, with Bowie's 1970s Berlin period as an extension of that bohemian Germany, though that is admitted to be far-fetched; more likely Tarantino just thought it would be cool, which has to be accepted with every Tarantino choice, like the title spelling he said he would never explain, an homage to the 70s movie and a Basquiat-esque flourish.
The switch to slow motion when Frederick shoots Shoshana is one of the only pieces of filmmaking in the movie a host dislikes, cheesy and weird and a nod to a different kind of movie, among the literal dozens of homages in the film.
This is called one of the hardest picks the show has had: the movie is essentially five 20-to-30-minute scenes and holds three of a host's favorite scenes of the century. The nominees read out are the La Louisiane tavern with Fassbender, Kruger and Hellstrom; Landa at the dairy farm, the opening 20 minutes; Hickox meeting Fennec (as transcribed) and Churchill; Shoshana's strudel lunch with Goebbels and Landa, specifically her stifled cry when Landa leaves; and the Cat People scene of her putting on the makeup and the dress. Little Aldo is on the list, though his speech could be.
The introduction of the Bear Jew has to be on the list: Aldo's conversation with the German soldier, the bat knocking in the tunnel, the needle drop as Donnie Donowitz emerges, and the high laughter at the Boston accent, which is Eli Roth doing a Ted Williams impression; the hosts chant the Teddy ballgame and Lansdowne Street lines.
Other nominees: the forehead-carving reveal in that sequence, the Bear Jew's first kill, the Stiglitz killing-spree montage with its heavy metal riff and Samuel L. Jackson voiceover, the Hans flip at the end with Aldo's bluffing and pursuit of vengeance and the 'just a chewing out' moment, the theater carnage, and the Gorlami scene introducing the three Italian compatriots to Landa with their Godfather hands, which lets the audience laugh after the weighty historical material.
The tavern scene is a host's favorite part along with the opening 20 minutes: essentially Tarantino making a Hitchcock movie, like Rope, one of the great bar scenes, with two thirds of it spent on the heads-up card game; a joke asks whether people in the 40s were smarter, and the answer is that it is a Tarantino invention in which every character is clever.
Hellstrom's King Kong theory is Tarantino's own, shared with Terry Gross on Fresh Air; the tension builds when the unseen Hellstrom stands up with his boot of beer, and the scene is a comedy of manners about how long they have to stay, a literal card game in which each side ups the ante until pistols are pointed at testicles, capped by the hand gesture for the scotches.
Fassbender's performance is called crazy: a man born in Germany, raised speaking German, moved to Ireland and learned English, playing an Englishman who learned German and affects an invented Pitzpaloo-esque (as transcribed) accent; he tried out for Landa five times and was heartbroken before being given Hickox, and this was the moment a host asked who that movie star was, after Hunger had made him look like the next Daniel Day Lewis (transcribed 'Dale and Dale Lewis'), with this suggesting the next James Bond.
Hickox talks like Trevor Howard and looks like Sean Connery, the smartest and most dashing man in the room but also a pretentious film critic who appreciates a good scotch; alcohol is deployed throughout the scene, from the boot of beer and the soldiers' schnapps for Maximilian's birth to the champagne and the scotch that gives the Englishman away.
The 'speaking the kings' line is a line a screenwriter waits his whole life for; Fassbender's affectation and manner change the second he does the hand, knowing it is over, and Hellstrom knows too, which is the point of the line that neither of them is getting out of the bar.
August Diehl as Dieter Hellstrom, called the most evil Nazi name ever heard, gives a hell of a performance going nose to nose with Fassbender; Bridget von Hammerschmark's (as transcribed) overconfidence in insisting they stay, when the soldiers knew before going downstairs that a meeting in a basement was insane, raises the question of whether the scene wants the audience to doubt her loyalty.
The answer offered is that the scene hammers home that these people had jobs before the war, a film critic and an actress rather than trained soldiers, so she might simply pick a bar whose bartender she knows; her operating-table line that it was either a trap or a terrible coincidence but not both reflects what probably happened thousands of times in the war.
The ticking-clock tension of the tavern is Hitchcockian, but it may not beat the opening 20 minutes: the lights go down, the Morricone music and the odd title fonts start, and the film opens like a spaghetti Western, building and building as someone comes up the road, with Lea Seydoux there, before a 20-minute conversation between the dairy farmer and Hans Landa that announces Waltz as an actor nobody had seen before.
The opening shot is almost exactly the opening shot of Unforgiven and the setup of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, both huge movies for Tarantino; the Morricone score is from The Big Gun Down and the opening signature (transcribed as 'Fira Lys') is Beethoven, the great Germanic composer arriving in a small village just like Landa. The sequence then becomes a Sherlock Holmes movie bookended by Westerns, with Shoshana running toward the horizon echoing The Searchers and John Wayne in the doorframe, even though Tarantino hates John Ford.
The doorframe says that Jews in Europe in the early 40s were always outsiders on the run, and frames a movie poster for what unfolds as she runs toward her cinema in Operation Kino; it is impossible to overrate what it meant that the film really speaks the languages of the time and place, with an actor who could act in French, German, English and Italian.
Landa asking to switch to English so the family under the floorboards would not understand was his plan all along; Waltz can be taken for granted now because he repeats the trick, but the modulation when he asks 'You're sheltering enemies of the state, are you not?' and drops the gregarious affectation reveals the heavy of the movie, the big bad rather than Hitler, in one of the most memorable introductions of an actor and a character.
The scene is simultaneously compelling and horrifying: the gregarious guest asking for a glass of milk and lighting his pipe, then the instant pivot into an incarnation of horror; the pan down to the Dreyfus family hiding below and back up to their eyes, people the audience just met whose stakes are instantly understood; then 'Au revoir Shoshana' and the 'boop' with the gun, suggesting that for Landa the pursuit is as gratifying as the catch and that her escape only entices him more.
Landa changes across the movie's three or four years: in 1941 he is a cookie full of arsenic, sweet outside and evil inside, proud of the Jew Hunter nickname, but by his talk with Aldo he claims to be an honorable man who does not control nicknames. One reading is that he is just saying what seals the deal rather than showing a change of conscience; another is that he has to stay elusive to keep an advantage, overpowering with Lepedit (as transcribed) and negotiating with Aldo while still in charge, which also shows the bureaucratic and clerical tyranny of the Germans, with the carrot that they would not harass the family anymore.
The Mike Myers scene is loved as a work of imagination: Rod Taylor coming out of retirement to play Winston Churchill, Myers as a military attache, the scotch in the globe, Fassbender talking about Pabst, Selznick and Louis B. Mayer, and the 'Down with Hitler. All the way down' toast; the last 10 years of Myers' career are called strange, but a star who no longer needs to make Austin Powers 4 can simply spend two days in a Tarantino movie and be part of it forever.
In the strudel lunch, 'wait for the cream' is good advice even though Hans is a monster, and the cigarette put out in the cream is called the biggest on-the-nose metaphor in the movie, the cookie with arsenic again.
Asked by name whether he likes strudel, the host cannot recall ever eating it, assumes it is pretty good, and is not really into a flaky pastry. — Chris Ryan
Melanie Laurent's eyes pop at her first bite of strudel, read as a character who has not had dessert in 10 years because of the life she was forced into; the counter is that she and Marcel could get strudel or the 1940s French Milk Duds at the cinema, but the moment reads as someone who never gets taken to nice lunches while being terrified, with pleasure and pain mixed together.
The quick moment when Hans orders her a glass of milk, as if to say he knows who she is, is one of the most tense in the film and sincerely scary; Laurent and Kruger are revelations up there with Waltz, Kruger previously known mainly as the beauty from Troi (as transcribed), and the earlier part of the sequence is strong too, with Goebbels and Shoshana talking through the French translator while Zoller tries to ingratiate both Goebbels and a woman who wants him dead, a schoolyard romance that is complex yet easy to understand.
The final call is a toss-up between the opening dairy farm sequence and the tavern, but the Hans introduction comes to mind first, so the dairy farm is the pick; the others agree, calling it one of the most searing scenes they have seen, with a last glaze of syrup for 'Teddy fucking ball game'.
Earlier, not wanting to jump ahead to most rewatchable scene, a host notes you could basically say the whole movie.
