The SS detail approaches the French farmer’s home.
The farmer’s daughters. One, glancing downward, reveals to Landa, the SS “Jew-hunter” that the family he seeks is below the floorboards.
Pierre LaPadite, the farmer hiding his Jewish friends, just before the tear–he realizes he and his daughters are doomed unless he betrays the SS officer’s prey.

Mr. Amateur Movie Critic strikes again.

I started to watch the opening scene to Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds” last night and I was transfixed. Luckily (yeah, we’re still cable) I found it, I think on Showtime, and was able to start the film over again.

This has to be one of the most beautiiful–and most sinister–film scenes I have ever seen. This part shows of the arrival of the immensely charming SS officer and his interrogaton of a French farmer. (One of the lovely daughters, Lea Seydoux, became Owen Wilson’s love interest at the end of “Midnight in Paris.”)

I will not show the rest of the scene because it’s too cruel–as is the rest of the film, with its brain-bashings, forehead carvings, index finger wound-probings, scalping of Nazis, German MP-40 (submachine gun) massacres, mass incinerations, and so on.

The usual Tarantiono stuff. I could do without about 70% of it., stuff that might make even San Peckinpah blush. I guess I have a love/grossed out relationship with this Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction” is one of my favorite films).

But this scene, with the interplay between the SS hunter and the farmer hiding his prey–a family of Jews is just beneath the floorboards of the farmhouse, is one of the most brilliant film sequences I have eve seen. Ever. Both actors–Perrier LaPadite at the farmers and Christopher Walz at the SS officer, charming and ingratiating and clever, and increasingly murderous, deliver one of what I think is one of the finest film dialogues I have ever seen.

To me, what makes it brilliant comes near the end, when, in silence, a tear creeps down the farmer’s face.

Here is the scene, in its entietry. Warning: it is violent at its end. It needs to be stopped. So did the SS. As fraught as our relationship is today, that’s exactly what the Allied Powers did. It took too long.