Inglourious Basterds is filled with brutal and bad ass characters. The Bear Jew, for instance, will bash your head in with a baseball bat. The Jew Hunter will slyly have a lengthy conversation with you before choking you to death. And Lieutenant Aldo Raine enforced a rule that all the Basterds owe him 100 Nazi scalps. Yet, of all these men I believe that Hugo Stiglitz is the baddest of the bad.
After he murdered 13 Gestapo officers while he was in the Germany army he was recruited by the Basterds for his status of being unmerciful. It’s one thing to be a Basterd but to be recruited by them brings you to a different status. His vicious kills are done so to ensure the officers endure pain and he manages to become the most hated man in the German army. This is an ode to Hugo, the baddest Basterd of them all.
For starters, Hugo’s actions may be cruel but killing German officers was the most honorable thing to do at the time. And other than Archie Hicox, he is the only non-Jew of the Basterds. That means that not only did he go against the power of the Nazis in his native country but he fought for a nationality that he had no ties with. Hence, he has guts and a heart.
This showed similarities to the actor that played Hugo, Til Schweiger. According to Tarantino, Schweiger, being a German actor, refused to wear a Nazi uniform in any movie other than Inglourious Basterds. That’s because in this case, he got to kill them. In other words, the only connection Hugo and Til wanted with the Nazis was via murder.
And speaking of killing Nazis, the way that Hugo kills the officers is beautifully gory. In his introductory scene, Hugo is shown choking one man, strangling another, and simultaneously suffocating and stabbing a third. This impressive feat made him famous for being a Nazi traitor. His face was posted on every German newspaper, along with the 13 officers that met their end.
But beyond the bravery and the brutality, my favorite characteristic of Hugo is that he is extremely calm. This greatly contrasts his acts of rage that it’s comical. His actions are thought out and planned and he does them without flinching. The scene where the Basterds come to recruit him from jail shows the Basterds killing several guards while Hugo continues to smoke his cigarette as if nothing is happening. He is a boss.
His calm and quiet demeanor gives him a sense of ease and although he doesn’t have many lines in the movie, the few ones he does have are epic. One of my favorites is right before the shootout in the basement, Hugo has his gun right on Major Dieter Hellstrom’s lap he says, “At this range, I’m a real Frederick Zoller.”
Hugo has a venom to kill and a sharpened knife. He is quiet and a little crazy. He is the baddest Basterd there ever was.
Inglourious Bloggster 