What did Col. Hans Landa mean at the beginning of Inglorious Basterds
In the beginning of Inglorious Bastards, Col. Hans Landa asks the milk farmer if his "lovely daughters" could go out where his men were. The way he said it got me wondering if he was insinuating his men were going to use the girls for ill. Did anyone else wonder this or is it just me?
Best Answer
He was not at all insinuating anything - he was merely asking to have a private conversation with the farmer. What he says is:
COL LANDA:
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.
He only mentions his men to point out that they are able to have a private conversation without them. He wants the farmer to reciprocate. He doesn't say they need to go to the men, he asks them to step outside.
The farm-house is tiny, perhaps even one downstairs room. There is nowhere else the women can go and not overhear the conversation.
Col. Landa probably wants to do this so he can concentrate on manipulating the farmer, who will be more inclined to be cooperative if the conversation is private. The farmer knows there is a serious threat to the safety of his family from the Nazis, and the presence of the soldiers is definitely part of that - but I do not think he was specifically insinuating anything with this sentence.
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What happens in the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds?
He further commented on Late Show with David Letterman that Inglourious Basterds is a "Quentin Tarantino spelling". Tarantino has said that the film's opening scene, in which Landa interrogates the French dairy farmer, is his "favorite thing" he's "ever written".How did Hans Landa know they were under the floor?
He says that sending the girls outside (so he can "call them back in" later) and speaking in English (so he can make his big show of switching back to French later) indicate that he knew the Dreyfuses were underneath the floorboards the whole time.Why did Hans Landa order milk?
In the movie Inglorious Basterds, Hans Landa orders the Mademoiselle a glass of milk, a reference to the opening scene in the movie, implying that he knew, or at least suspected, that she was the escaped Shosanna Dreyfus girl from the first moment he met her.Why did Colonel Landa let Shoshanna go?
Given Landa's dedication to hunting down as many Jews as possible, it seems strange that he let Shosanna live, but it wasn't a brief moment of humanity, and he did it because he didn't think she would survive the night.What Makes Hans Landa One Of The Most Terrifying Villains in Film History
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Answer 2
Having seen the film a dozen times, and having read the whole script, I would say that Quentin Tarantino, the writer director, wants you to have a certain amount of respect for Hans Landa, up until that point that he no longer wants you to have that respect for him. That point being when he murders Bridget Von Hammersmark, an act that we need to see, so that we are no sympathetic to him when Aldo has a Swastika carved into his forehead.
But in the beginning we need to respect him and his professionalism, something that he harps on later in the film, so as such, he has the women leave, so as not to make it seem like they are pawns, nor subjected to witnessing the murder of the Jewish family, that he knows darn well are hiding there.
If those girls were present for any of this, we would not like him nearly as much going forward, and Quentin definitely wants us to like him for a while.
Quentin does nothing for no reason. Everything has to make sense and have purpose. Them leaving so that we the audience only had to concentrate on two characters instead of five, simply made sense.
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