Antonio Margheriti

A British spy (Michael Fassbender) is a film critic with an expertise in German cinema and G.W. Pabst; Melanie Laurent plays the proprieter of a cinema in Nazi-occupied France who screens films by Henri-Georges Clouzot for the locals and "The White Hell of Pitz Palu" with Leni Riefenstahl for the occupiers; Emil Jannings (Hilmar Eichhorn) makes a cameo; a guess-the-famous-name card game includes references to Pola Negri, King Kong and Edgar Wallace (the mystery writer whose work inspired an entire genre of postwar German thrillers known as krimi); the first "chapter" of the film is an extended revamp of Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West"; when one of the Basterds disguises himself as an Italian, he is given the name "Antonio Margheriti" -- a reference to the director of such 1960s Italian horror movies as "Castle of Blood."