The actor:	Til Schweiger
The character:	Hugo Stiglitz
The film:	Inglourious Basterds
The line:	“Say auf wiedersehen to your Nazi balls!”

There are four movies in Quentin Tarantino’s career where it looked like he was going to shift into a new gear that might go on to define his career. The first was Jackie Brown, which is glossier than Pulp Fiction and far more intimate, is technically another L.A. crime story, but more importantly an outright adaptation of a writer that I think even Tarantino would grant is superior to himself. The second and third were the Kill Bill movies, which seemed to move Tarantino more towards pure fanboy genre homage. The last, and I’d say the most successful as a single picture, is Inglourious Basterds. He’s been chasing Inglourious Basterds for over a decade now, chasing that high of changing history in a suitably grimy setting, chasing that stomach-dropping moment where we realize that August Diehl has been listening from a secluded place none of us knew existed.

Django Unchained was a failure, in some ways a perfect filmic encapsulation of the nonchalant, superior, and unexpecting attitude of the nation during the second term of Obama’s presidency. The meritocrats had won, the Democrats had made control of government a fait accompli, and the Tea Party was on the run. Nothing was left to do but make Bronx cheers at people like Paul Ryan and the proto-Klansmen of Django on their way out the door. And Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is quite charming until it decides it wants to be part of history rather than part of a television movie.

The worst movie that Tarantino has ever made, and if God is merciful the worst movie he’ll ever make, is The Hateful Eight. It’s an interminable version of the scene in the underground bar in Inglourious Basterds, just with plot exposition and the n-word replacing that game with cards on the forehead and pitter-patter about G.W. Pabst. It’s the movie which proves all of the Tarantino skeptics, critics, and haters right.

In this short burst, though, in this one long, taut scene at the heart of Basterds which ends with people “fighting in a basement” against the better judgment of Aldo Raine, even the skeptics-critics-haters have to be a little taken. Most of all by Til Schweiger, playing one of those ultimate badasses you only find in movies. Even in the movies they get sanitized out of existence so as not to scare the kids: thus Gary Cooper in Sergeant York and Audie Murphy as Audie Murphy. No, Hugo Stiglitz is not concerned with niceties or kids in the audience. Hugo Stiglitz is not even concerned with putting Hellstrom in a more mortally compromising position than the one he puts him in. The point is to have the gun in the most ticklish place possible.

“Say auf wiedersehen to your Nazi balls,” which I’m fairly sure are the last words that Stiglitz gets, is Tarantino at his grindhouse best. This is the line where he fulfills all these expectations about someone who can turn trash into treasure by glorifying the trashiness. Wearing a card that says “Marco Polo” on his head, speaking in English because this line is a lot funnier in English than it would be in German, Schweiger pulls the trigger, the squib goes, and everyone in the audience can say auf wiedersehen in unison while the bullets fly. It must have been so tempting to say “Nazi nuts.” It’s alliterative, it’s catchy. But “Nazi balls,” which sounds weirdly like “matzoh balls,” is just so much goofier. It’s earthy in a way that “nuts” isn’t, grown-up and childish at the same time. Because I am both grown-up and childish, I’ll still cackle thinking about it.