Goofs for
Inglourious Basterds (2009) More at IMDbPro »

• Factual errors: The "Magnetophon" was a German invention and state secret until 1945 due to its use in propaganda and spying of radio broadcasts. There is no way a French cinema owner would have one in the attic: sound was optically recorded in movies, or picked up on gramophones.
  
  
• Continuity: The "Brigitte Horney" card on Archie Hilcox's forehead changes direction in between takes.
  
  
• Anachronisms: Toward the end there is a scene where there is a negotiation over whether the call will be made back to the theater or not, the phone handset is connected to the phone with a perfectly coiled black cord that didn't exist in the fifties, let alone the forties.
  
  

• Factual errors: Hitler has brown eyes in the movie, but in reality he had light blue eyes.
  
  
• Continuity: In the first chapter, when Col. Landa was talking to the Gentile holding the Jews, the glass of milk he was drinking repeatedly moved positions back and forth, and the level of milk in the glasses changes.
  
  
• Continuity: When Lt. Aldo Raine is speaking to Col. Hans Landa in the forest, his open bow tie on his right disappears and reappears under his jacket.
  
  
• Factual errors: During Hitler's first appearance we see a map of Europe and where Turkey is supposed to be, reads "Osmanien" (written in Fraktur, making the "s" look like a "t"). The Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1923 and Turkey was established in that region, approximately 20 years before when this movie is supposed to be taking place.
  
  
• Continuity: After Mathilda has taken Bridgets place to join the quiz game with the soldiers, bartender Eric leaves the counter and walks over to assist her. He is shown standing left behind her. Then the camera cuts to the officers' table. In the background Eric is shown standing behind the counter again.
  
  
• Continuity: During the beginning of the movie, a couple of painters are painting on the wall while Hitler is talking to his generals. But they are gone in the next over-head camera angle shot.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): When the Lieutenant meets the General and Churchill, the strings are hanging out of his beret which is the French style, not the American or British style (unless the Director was trying to show the character's lack of military bearing.)
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: Col. Hans Landa claims the Bubonic Plague was caused by rats. However the plague was caused by fleas on the rats, not the rats themselves. Despite this, at the time it was largely believed rats were the cause so it is correct for Landa's character to be mistaken.
  
  
• Continuity: In chapter one, when Colonel Landa is sitting at the kitchen table with Perrier LaPadite, the shadow changes shape and "density" and sometimes disappears completely during different shots from the same camera angle. When Colonel Landa starts writing on the piece of paper, the shadow nearly covers half the table and is very dark, but then when we see the same camera angle a few seconds later, there's no shadow on the table. It then reappears again but of different length in another shot from the same angle about a minute later.
  
  
• Continuity: When Lt Raine is speaking to the Basterds and says "We're into one thing", he is standing at the right side (Samm Levine's) of the formation. An instant later, when he says "Killin' Nazis", he is at the other end. There was not enough time to get from one side of the formation to the other.
  
  
• Continuity: The level of beer in the glass, shaped like a boot, of the Nazi-officer in the basement pub, changes between shots.
  
  
• Factual errors: At the premier, Pvt. Zoller is in his full dress uniform with all his decorations. He wears the Knight's Cross with oak leaves, swords, and cut diamonds around his neck and the Iron Cross 2nd class on his chest. However, conspicuously absent is the Iron Cross 1st class, which he certainly would've worn to the occasion (see where Hitler wears his), and which is necessary to receive the Knight's Cross. Without the 1st class award, he could not have received a Knight's Cross let alone with oak leaves, swords, and cut diamonds.
  
  
• Factual errors: At the premier, Pvt. Zoller wears his Knight's Cross around his neck but when in uniform in all other scenes, he is without it. The Knight's Cross is of the highest orders the Third Reich bestowed upon soldiers and when in any uniform Zoller would have worn it around the neck.
  
  
• Anachronisms: At the cinema, Col. Landa is shown wearing the Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross in Gold. That award did not exist in 1944.
  
  
• Continuity: In the final scene where Col. Landa is surrendering to Lt. Raine, Lt. Raine's tie is untied and hanging off both shoulders. In one shot, the right half of the tie moves behind him, then returns in front in the next shot.
  
  
• Continuity: During the cinema scene when Shosanna is taking the letters off the marquee, the position of the letters on the blanket changes between shots.
  
  
• Continuity: When Shosanna is on the ladder for the second time, before the Germans come to take her, she is cleaning black letters. She cleans 2 different letters, one of them a 'u', another one, and the 'l' remains uncleaned. The next shot you can see only the 'l' has been cleaned.
  
  
• Anachronisms: After Sgt. Donowitz ("The Bear Jew") kills the German soldier with the bat, he struts about shouting a "play-by-play" account of his action. During this, he uses the phrase "Donowitz goes yard!", meaning hitting a home run. The term "goes yard" was not used for a home run until the 1990s.
  
  
• Factual errors: The translation of the Scotch is written as "whiskey". Scottish "whisky" never has an e, and has never had an e.
  
  
• Continuity: When Shosanna first meets Zoller, she is taking the red letters of the board at the cinema and throwing them down to a canvas sheet on the ground. The letters move around on the canvas throughout the scene when the camera angles shows Zoller from above.
  
  
• Anachronisms: As the German soldiers in the bar play the card game one of them is "Winnetou", a fictional Apache created by Karl May and a very popular book series. When he guesses his character he stands up and imitates a gesture with his arm - moving it away from his heart saying "I am Winnetou!" This gesture was used first by actor Pierre Brice in the 1960s Winnetou movies.
  
  
• Continuity: In the ditch scene, while Lt. Aldo Raine questions the first of his three German prisoners Sgt. Werner Rachtmann, the latter's Close Combat clasp (worn over his left breast pocket) appears and disappears between scenes.
  
  
• Continuity: In the bar, when Dieter Hellstrom has succesfully found out that "King Kong" was on his playing card, he takes the card off and puts it on the table. In the next shot, filming Cpl. Wicki over the shoulder of Hellstrom, the playing card is still on the forehead of Hellstrom.
  
  
• Factual errors: In several scenes Pvt. Zoller is seen wearing shoulder patches with the letters GD, which was used by members of the Grossdeutschland Division. This division was deployed on the Eastern Front since 1941, yet in the "Nation's Pride" movie Zoller is fighting Americans. That would be impossible if he was in the GD-division.
  
  
• Anachronisms: Lt. Archie Hicox uses the phrase "Paris, when it sizzles," which was a lyric from Cole Porter's "Can-Can" ("I Love Paris"), not written until the 1950s. Porter coined the phrase, he didn't just adopt it from general usage.
  
  
• Factual errors: Lt Aldo Raine is wearing the 1st Special Service Force unit insignia, yet later he is referred to as a "Secret Service" officer. Raine could be called a "Special Service" or a "Strategic Service" (OSS) officer, but not "Secret Service", which is the organization founded in 1865 responsible for guarding the US President since 1894.
  
  
• Anachronisms: The red dress worn by the heroine has "invisible" plastic coil zippers inserted in the sleeve ends and center back, a technology that did not exist during WW2. Invisible zippers are a clean solution but no doubt, the designer didn't anticipate a close up of the inside sleeve, nor the evidential zipper pull at the dress center back.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: Many of the subtitling "errors", such as "Merci" instead of "Thank You", are intentional, given that these phrases are interchangeable and can be understood without English translation.
  
  
• Factual errors: Mike Myers' character salutes with no head dress on, which is incorrect British military custom.
  
  
• Factual errors: Hitler has a map hanging on the wall showing Nazi territory in red. The island of Malta is shown in red but it was never conquered by Germany during WWII.
  
  
• Continuity: Near the beginning of the film, when Hans Landa is talking to Perrier LaPadite, there is a moth that visibly lands on Landa's glass and climbs to the top of it. When the camera angle changes, the moth is gone.
  
  
• Anachronisms: When Mélanie Laurent is updating the sign outside the cinema, the red characters are see-through, and she throws them at a stack from the top of the ladder. This implicates they are made from a see-through, hard to break material like poly-carbonate. These characters would not have been available during WWII.
  
  
• Continuity: Shosanna is introduced working on her marquee in Paris, according to subtitle, "4 years later", then her escape from Col Landa, which is depicted as spring or summer 1941. Paris was in Allied hands before the end of August 1944. The arithmetic is "3 years later".
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: Stiglitz' eyelid moves several times when Landa examines him after the bar slaughter scene - too bad Stiglitz is supposed to be dead by the time.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: After his men used automatic weapons to shoot, in Col. Landa's close-up in the doorway, his plastic ear protectors are visible.
  
  
• Continuity: In the scene where Shoshanna is getting her red dress and make up on, she's seen putting the red lipstick on her lips, in the next scene she's taking a sip of water, but her lipstick is gone.
  
  
• Anachronisms: At various times during the movie the distinctive enamel decorated Perrier-Jouet cuvée Belle Epoque champagne bottle is shown. Although this bottle design was created in 1902 by Emile Galle it was quickly forgotten. In 1964, Pierre Ernst discovered four of these bottles and the design was re-released two years later to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Duke Ellington.
  
  
• Factual errors: SS Oberführer (colonel) wears an Sicherheitsdienst (SD) tunic at the movie premiere with a Blood Order medal on his right breast pocket, which should have been just the ribbon only. He also wears an Order of the Red Eagle around his neck on a ribbon which would have meant that he earned it during WWI, yet he's too young.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: At the beginning of the film, the timing it takes for Hans and his men on the motor vehicle to arrive at the dairy farm is completely inconsistent. When the camera shows them approaching the farm in the background, they pass the same tree next to the road three times. However, this may well be a deliberate editing choice, as this opening scene contains the most concentrated use of the "spaghetti western" motif, and such continuity errors are common within the genre.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: At the beginning of the film the Gentile's daughter is hanging sheets on the line to dry; however, the sheet she is securing to the line is already dry (it isn't wet).
  
  
• Continuity: La Padite starts his pipe and it should produce a decent billow of smoke to some of the air, but he soon puts it down and there is no trace of smoke anywhere in the small farmhouse.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: Archie refers to Aldo as "lootenant." Normally, a British officer would pronounce it "leftenant" among fellow British officers. Out of professional courtesy, however, British officers typically use the American pronunciation when dealing with American officers.
  
  
• Factual errors: In the café scene, where SS Colonel Landa meets Shosanna Dreyfus, Landa can be seen wearing the Germanic Proficiency Runes SS badge. This was a very rare decoration only issued to non-Germans attached to the "Germanic-SS" in occupied countries. The badge was never awarded to full German SS members and the badge would certainly never have been awarded to a SD Colonel in Paris.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: The highly flammable nitro film of the period plays a major role in the film's showdown. However, in the projection booth, projectors are show with visible running film reels, which would have been totally unthinkable at that time. All projectors were equipped with fire proof boxes in which the reels would run. These boxes had only small windows for the projectionist to check for the amount of run off or taken up film. If the film started burning, only the few inches actually running through the mechanics would be affected, not the major portions in the fire proof boxes.
  
  
• Anachronisms: In the opening scenes at the farmhouse, it can be clearly seen that the fields have been farmed using mechanized farm equipment - the crop marks from spraying from tractors, for instance. Rural France before the 1960s in general and during the war in particular, was not mechanized in any meaningful way until an influx of wealth from Great Britain and Germany via the Common Agricultural Policy of the Common Market/European Community/European Union. It would all have been horse drawn or manual.
  
  
• Anachronisms: During close-ups of Lt. Aldo Raine as he's addressing the eight Jewish-American soldiers, an ear piercing hole is clearly seen in his left earlobe. Men, especially soldiers, did not pierce their ears in the 1940s.
  
  
• Continuity: In the café scene in which Landa sits across from Raine and Utivich, one of the black studs on Raine's tuxedo shirt is missing but appears in the next shot.
  
  
• Continuity: When Sgt. Donowitz (a.k.a. The Bear Jew) beats the captured Nazi to death under the bridge, we see blood on the ground near the corpse, but when it switches to an overhead shot, the blood has disappeared.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: Soshanna and Zoller are talking outside the theatre. It is supposed to be June in Paris and you can see them breathing like it is winter time.
  
  
• Continuity: When Landa orders the strudels, the server first puts the milk on the table, at which point the espresso is on the server's plate. In the next shot, the espresso is on the table already.
  
  
• Anachronisms: In the scene where the former film critic, Lt. Archie Hicox, meets with Churchill, and General Fenech, there is a map on the wall. France is shown with the north, the part originally occupied by the Germans, in a dark color. All of France to the south of that area is shown in a lighter shade. That would indicate Vichy France, the Nazi puppet regime. The meeting is happening in 1944. But on November 11, 1942, the German Army invaded the Vichy area and began occupying it. So, the whole of France, excepting any liberated areas, should have been the darker color.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: During the card game, Bridget's card reads "Genghis Khan". However, since the game was played entirely by Germans, they would have used the German spelling, "Dschingis Khan". (Also, when leaving the table, Bridget comments that she never would have guessed it and uses the English pronunciation, even though she's speaking German.)
  
  
• Continuity: After shooting Frederick, Shosanna kneels next to him and touches him before he turns around and shoots her. However, in the next shot, instead of being in the kneel-ed position next to Frederick, she is back standing next to projectors as she is being shot.
  
  
• Factual errors: In the scene in the farmhouse in 1941, (not winter) Hans Landa is wearing an Eastern Front Medal - the red white and black ribbon bar through the second from the top tunic button hole - that was instituted on May 26, 1942 and needed 14 days active service from November 1941 onwards.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: Just after Shoshanna makes up, Marcel starts to film and says «Tu nous la fais en une prise» ("You do it in one take"), but the English subtitles simply say "Remember".
  
  
• Factual errors: After the bar-basement fight, when Landa is identifying soldiers, the subtitles say that Wicki "immigrated to the United States" when he should have said that he "emigrated".
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: In the opening scene the dairy farmer is swinging an ax down on to a large tree stump, as if splitting logs. There are no logs or split wood visible - some have said he is just aimlessly whacking at a smoothly sawed off tree stump. He isn't - he is clearly chopping away at the stump to remove it.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): When Lt. Hicox says "And seeing as I might be rapping on the door momentarily", he uses "momentarily" in the sense of "in a moment". In the British English of the time, "momentarily" would have exclusively meant "for a moment", so he would not have used that word.
  
  

• Plot holes: SPOILER: The Basterds consists of 9 people in the beginning and they add Hugo Stiglitz along the way. Making the group an even 10 people. Stiglitz and Wicki are killed in the basement bar. Lt. Hicox is not a member of the basterds. The group is now down to 8 men. Donowitz and Ulmer are killed in the cinema leaving the group with 6 people. Lt. Raine and PFC are captured and the remaining 4 people are never heard of: Hirschberg, Sakowitz, Zimmerman and Kagan. Since Utivich is already in the truck when Lt. Raine is thrown in there, we are to assume that the rest has been killed, making Utivich the sole survivor from the attack.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: SPOILER: Any mistake relating to actual facts of the Second World War can be thrown out with one explanation: This is Tarantino's universe, where Hitler was blown up in a burning theater. Anything can happen.
  
  
• Continuity: SPOILER: When Shosanna takes the specially prepared fourth reel (with her 'surprise' for the Nazis) out of the case, her hair is down and hanging loose. In the next shot, just a few seconds later, as she is putting the reel on the projector, her hair is pinned back. Some time after this, when the bell on her projector tinkles to let her know it's time to switch reels, she glances out the projector porthole at the audience and we see her hair is again down and hanging loose. As she pulls the lever to activate the reel, just a few seconds after this, her hair is once again pinned back, remaining this way throughout her final scene.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: SPOILER: When Col. Hans Landa's men shoot through the floor boards in LaPadite's house, the resultant bullet holes in the boards are funnel shaped, being larger in diameter at the top and smaller diameter at the bottom. In reality, the opposite would be true. The point of entry would be just a clean round hole with no funnel shape carved in the boards as seen from above the floor boards.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: SPOILER: It is hard to believe that Landa who checks for the cinema's safety does not discover the enormous pile of highly flammable cellulose nitrate film behind the screen. However, Landa is shown at the end of the movie to only be looking out for his own interests. It is likely that he saw the film, but chose not to report it so he could ensure that his attempt to gain amnesty would succeed.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: SPOILER: Reflection of camera and operator is visible on the short wave radio mike that Landa's holding when speaking to the American general.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): SPOILER: Though Melanie Laurent's characters' first name is spelled Shosanna, various characters throughout the film pronounce her name "Shoshanna". Most notably Col. Landa when he shouts "Au Revoir, Shoshanna!" as she runs away after her family is killed.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: SPOILER: After Donny and Omar kill Hitler and Goebbels in the Opera box, as they begin to fire randomly into the panicking crowd, Donny's white shirt is clean and spotless. Each successive view of him as he continues firing into the crowd, shows his shirt becoming more and more blood-spattered even though the crowd he is firing into, is more than ten feet below him on the floor of the auditorium. The only people close enough to spatter his shirt with blood were Hitler, Goebbels and the woman companion, who they'd already killed before any blood is shown on Donny's shirt.
  
  
• Continuity: SPOILER: In the last scene Aldo shoots Herrman. In the shot where he shoots Herrman it is seen that he falls facing away from Aldo, i.e. is the farthest away from Aldo. But later when Uitivich is scalping Herrman we see that Herrman's head is facing Aldo. This can be proved because Uitivich even looks up in Aldo's direction.
  
  
• Factual errors: SPOILER: At the premier, Pvt. Zoller is dressed in his formal uniform. Soldiers aren't armed when dressed formal. Yet Zoller shoots Shosanna with a Walther P38 pistol. Furthermore, only officers are issued sidearms and Zoller, an enlisted man, would not have a pistol.
  
  

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