Inglourious Basterds (2 page)

Don’t be ridiculous, Herr Colonel.

While still holding the French woman’s hand and looking into her eyes, the S.S. colonel says:

Monsieur LaPadite, the rumors I have heard in the village about your family are all true. Your wife
is
a beautiful woman.

His eyes leave the mother and move to the three daughters.

(CON’T)

And each of your daughters is more lovely than the last.

Merci. Please have a seat.

The farmer offers the S.S. colonel a seat at the family’s wooden dinner table. The Nazi officer accepts the French farmer’s
offer and lowers himself into the chair, placing his gray S.S. cap on the table and keeping his black attaché case on the
floor by his feet.

The farmer (perfect host) turns to his wife and says:

Charlotte, would you be so good as to get the Colonel some wine?

Merci beaucoup, Monsieur LaPadite, but no wine. This being a dairy farm, one would be safe in assuming you have milk?

Oui.

Then milk is what I prefer.

Very well.

The mother of three takes a carafe of milk out of the icebox and pours a tall glass of the fresh white liquid for the colonel.

The S.S. colonel takes a long drink from the glass, then puts it down LOUDLY on the wooden table.

Monsieur, to both your family and your cows I say: Bravo.

Merci.

Please, join me at your table.

Very well.

The French farmer sits at his wooden dinner table across from the Nazi.

The women remain standing.

Col. Landa leans forward and says to the farmer in a low tone of confidentiality:

Monsieur LaPadite, what we have to discuss would be better discussed in private. You’ll notice, I left my men outdoors. If
it wouldn’t offend them, could you ask your lovely ladies to step outside?

You are right.

(to his women)

Charlotte, would you take the girls outside. The Colonel and I need to have a few words.

The farmer’s wife follows her husband’s orders and gathers her daughters, taking them outside, closing the door behind them.

The two men are alone at the farmer’s dinner table, in the farmer’s humble home.

Monsieur LaPadite, I regret to inform you I’ve exhausted the extent of my French. To continue to speak it so inadequately
would only serve to embarrass me. However, I’ve been led to believe you speak English quite well?

Oui.

Well, it just so happens, I do as well. This being your house, I ask your permission to switch to English for the remainder
of the conversation.

By all means.

They now speak ENGLISH:

Monsieur LaPadite, while I’m very familiar with you and your family, I have no way of knowing if you are familiar with who
I am. Are you aware of my existence?

The farmer answers:

Yes.

This is good. Are you aware of the job I’ve been ordered to carry out in France?

Yes.

The colonel drinks more milk.

Please tell me what you’ve heard?

I’ve heard the Führer has put you in charge of rounding up the Jews left in France who are either hiding or passing for gentile.

The S.S. colonel smiles.

The Führer couldn’t have said it better himself.

But the meaning of your visit, pleasant though it is, is mysterious to me. The Germans looked through my house nine months
ago for hiding Jews and found nothing.

I’m aware of that. I read the report on this area. But like any enterprise, when under new management, there’s always a slight
duplication of efforts. Most of it being a complete waste of time, but it needs to be done nevertheless. I just have a few
questions, Monsieur LaPadite. If you can assist me with answers, my department can close the file on your family.

Taking his black leather attaché case and placing it on the table, he takes out a folder from inside. He also extracts an
expensive black fountain pen from his uniform’s front pocket. Opening the folder and referring to it:

Now, before the occupation there were four Jewish families in this area, all dairy farmers like yourself: the Loveitts, the
Doleracs, the Rollins, and the Dreyfuses, is that correct?

To my knowledge those were the Jewish families among the dairy farmers.

Herr Colonel, would it disturb you if I smoked my pipe?

Looking up from his papers:

Please, Monsieur LaPadite, it is your house. Make yourself comfortable.

The farmer gets up from the table, goes to a shelf over the fireplace, and removes from it a WOODEN BOX that contains all
the fixings to his pipe. He sits back down at the table with his Nazi guest.

As the farmer loads the bowl of his pipe with tobacco, sets a match to it, and begins slowly puffing, making it red hot, the
S.S. colonel studies the papers in front of him.

Now, according to these papers, all the Jewish families in this area have been accounted for—except the Dreyfuses. Somewhere
in the last year it would appear they have vanished.

Which leads me to the conclusion that they’ve either made good their escape or someone is very successful hiding them.

(looking up from his papers, across the table at the farmer)

What have you heard about the Dreyfuses, Monsieur LaPadite?

Only rumors—

—I love rumors! Facts can be so misleading, where rumors, true or false, are often revealing. So, Monsieur LaPadite, what
rumors have you heard regarding the Dreyfuses?

The farmer looks at Landa.

Speak freely, Monsieur LaPadite, I want to hear what the rumors are, not who told them to you.

The farmer puffs thoroughly on his pipe.

Again, this is just a rumor—but we heard the Dreyfuses had made their way into Spain.

So the rumors you’ve heard have been of escape?

Yes.

Were the LaPadites and the Dreyfuses friendly?

As the farmer answers this question, the CAMERA LOWERS behind his chair, to the floor, past the floor, to a small area underneath
the floorboards, revealing:

FIVE HUMAN BEINGS

lying horizontally underneath the farmer’s floorboards. These human beings are the DREYFUSES, who have lived lying down underneath
the dairy farmer’s house for the past year. But one couldn’t call what the Dreyfuses have done for the last year living. This
family has done the only thing they could—hide from an occupying army that wishes to exterminate them.

We were families in the same community, in the same business. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but members of the same community.
We had common interests.

The S.S. colonel takes in this answer, seems to accept it, then moves to the next question.

Having never met the Dreyfuses, would you confirm for me the exact members of the household and their names?

There were five of them. The father, Jacob… wife, Miriam… her brother, Bob…

—How old is Bob?

Thirty—thirty-one?

Continue.

And the children… Amos… and Shosanna.

Ages of the children?

Amos—six—I believe. And Shosanna was fifteen or sixteen, I’m not really sure.

CUT TO

EXT—DAIRY FARM—DAY

The mother and her three daughters finish taking the laundry off the clothesline.

They can’t hear anything going on inside.

The three Nazi soldiers watch the three daughters.

BACK TO LANDA AND PERRIER

Well, I guess that should do it.

He begins gathering up his papers and putting them back into his attaché case.

The farmer, cool as a cucumber, puffs on his pipe.

However, before I go, could I have another glass of your delicious milk?

But of course.

The farmer stands up, goes over to the icebox, and takes out the carafe of milk. As he walks over and fills the Nazi colonel’s
glass, the German officer talks.

Monsieur LaPadite, are you aware of the nickname the people of France have given me?

I have no interest in such things.

But you are aware of what they call me?

I’m aware.

What are you aware of?

That they call you “the Jew Hunter.”

Precisely! Now I understand your trepidation in repeating it.

Before he was assassinated, Heydrich apparently hated the moniker the good people of Prague bestowed on him. Actually, why
he would hate the name “the Hangman” is baffling to me.

It would appear he did everything in his power to earn it. But I, on the other hand,
love
my unofficial title, precisely
because
I’ve earned it.

As “the Jew Hunter” enjoys his fresh milk, he continues to theorize with the French farmer.

The feature that makes me such an effective hunter of the Jews is, as opposed to most German soldiers, I can
think
like a Jew, where they can only think like a German or, more precisely, a German soldier.

Now if one were to determine what attribute the German people share with a beast, it would be the cunning and predatory instinct
of a hawk.

(CON’T)

Negroes—gorillas—brain—lips—smell—physical strength—penis size.

But if one were to determine what attributes the Jews share with a beast, it would be that of the rat.

Now the Führer and Goebbels’s propaganda have said pretty much the same thing. Where our conclusions differ is I don’t consider
the comparison an insult. Consider for a moment the world a rat lives in. It’s a hostile world indeed. If a rat were to scamper
through your front door right now, would you greet it with hostility?

I suppose I would.

Has a rat ever done anything to you to create this animosity you feel toward them?

Rats spread disease, they bite people—

Unless some fool is stupid enough to try and handle a live one, rats don’t make it a practice of biting human beings. Rats
were the cause of the bubonic plague, but that was some time ago. In all your born days, has a rat ever caused you to be sick
a day in your life? I propose to you, any disease a rat could spread a squirrel would equally carry.

Yet I assume you don’t share the same animosity with squirrels that you do with rats, do you?

No.

Yet they are both rodents, are they not? And except for the fact that one has a big bushy tail, while the other has a long
repugnant tail of rodent skin, they even rather look alike, don’t they?

It is an interesting thought, Herr Colonel.

However, interesting as the thought may be, it makes not one bit of difference to how you feel. If a rat were to scamper through
your door this very minute, would you offer it a saucer of your delicious milk?

Probably not.

I didn’t think so. You don’t like them. You don’t really know why you don’t like them. All you know is, you find them repulsive.

(lets the metaphor sink in)

What a tremendously hostile world a rat must endure. Yet not only does he survive, he thrives. And the reason for this is
because our little foe has an instinct for survival and preservation second to none. And that, Monsieur, is what a Jew shares
with a rat.

Consequently, a German soldier conducts a search of a house suspected of hiding Jews. Where does the hawk look? He looks in
the barn, he looks in the attic, he looks in the cellar—he looks everywhere
he
would hide. But there are many places it would never occur to a hawk to hide. However, the reason the Führer brought me off
my Alps in Austria and placed me in French cow country today is because it does occur to me.

Because I’m aware what tremendous feats human beings are capable of once they abandon dignity.

(changing tone)

May I smoke my pipe as well?

The farmer’s cool facade is little by little eroding.

Please, colonel, make yourself at home.

The Jew Hunter removes both a pipe and a bag of tobacco fixings. The pipe, strangely enough, is a calabash, made from an S-shaped
gourd with a yellow skin and made famous by Sherlock Holmes.

As the Nazi colonel busies himself with his smoking, he continues to hold court at the Frenchman’s table.

The other mistake the German soldiers make is their severe handling of the citizens who give shelter and aid to the Jews.
These citizens are not enemies of the state. They are simply confused people, trying to make some sense out of the madness
war creates.

These citizens do not need punishing. They simply need to be reminded of their duty in wartime.

Let’s use you as a example, Monsieur LaPadite. In this war, you have found yourself in the middle of a conflict that has nothing
to do with yourself, your lovely ladies, or your cows—yet here you are.