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Der Führer's Face

Hitler gets what's coming to him: Quentin Tarantino.

Aug 31, 2009, Vol. 14, No. 46 • By JOHN PODHORETZ
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Inglourious Basterds

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

To begin with, a caution. There is no way to write honestly about Quentin Tarantino's new movie, Inglourious Basterds, without revealing its gobsmacking concluding twists. So if you want to see the movie unspoiled, do not read further.

I am giving you one more chance to turn back. No? Then here goes. At the climax a Boston Jew in the guise of an Italian cameraman riddles Adolf Hitler with machine-gun fire until the Führer is a bloodied, mangled, unrecognizable corpse.

The year is 1944, the month July. Hitler is attending the premiere of a movie in a theater in Paris. As Hitler is being massacred, the theater is set ablaze by its owner, a hidden Jewess named Shoshanna who has become the object of a celebrated Nazi soldier's desire, and her lover, a black man. Everyone dies.

The killing of Hitler and his inner circle has been made possible through the courtesy of a Nazi colonel named Hans Landa, nicknamed "the Jew Hunter." A man of immense cultivation and murderous instincts, who we have just watched strangle a traitor to death, Landa has figured out the plan and taken its designer, a former Tennessee moonshiner named Aldo Raine, into custody.

Rather than saving Hitler, Landa has Raine, who is the leader of the platoon that goes by the misspelled name of the title, radio American headquarters to secure him a full pardon, a house in Nantucket, and a Congressional Medal of Honor. Which he does.

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