We’ll probably get into a more in-depth piece of what’s missing from Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” in terms of the script and what’s on the screen, but in this recent MTV interview with Eli Roth, he explains — and sounding like he was unaware it was cut at the time — the flashback sequence of his character, Sgt. Donny Donowitz, The “Bear Jew,” that is not in the final movie. Or at least not the one that everyone saw in Cannes (and surely it’s DVD extra material only). Spoilers ahead, the part in bold, is not in the film and its the sequences where Cloris Leachman would have appeared had Tarantino found room for the scene.
“I’m from Boston, and having a baseball bat with you at all times is a very Boston thing,” explained Roth. “Now the baseball bat is most commonly used off the field. It’s the kind of thing you use in a traffic situation, like when someone honks at you. You pull the bat out of the back of your car and be like, ‘What’s that? What’d you say, guy?’
“So my character takes his bat and he goes around to every Jew in his neighborhood and gets them to all sign the name of someone they’re worried about in Europe,” Roth said. “He takes that bat with all the signatures over to Europe and he beats every Nazi he finds to death with it. He doesn’t want to shoot them. He’s not scalping them. He wants to physically pummel them to death.”
Here’s a scene from the film that may or may not have been online already, we’ve been so busy with Cannes stuff, it’s hard to keep it all straight, but suffice to say it gives the lead-up introduction to Roth’s character and had it been unedited, it would be the part in the film that would have led into the aforementioned missing flashback, which was cute, but superfluous and we can understand why Quentin cut it.