The John Wayne movie Quentin Tarantino never watched but still stole from: “I don’t really have the association”
Even though every one of his nine features to date, excluding his adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch as Jackie Brown, has been a completely original piece of work, Quentin Tarantino has earned his stripes as cinema’s most famous magpie.
Armed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the medium that covers everything from the greatest movies ever made to the exploitation fare and low-budget schlock he was raised on, Tarantino has incorporated aspects of films he holds dear into his own oeuvre, ranging from shot composition to needle drops on the soundtrack.
It’s an approach that’s worked wonders after Tarantino built his name on making the familiar feel fresh again, whether it was inadvertently reshaping both independent American cinema and the modern crime thriller through Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction or harking back to the men-on-a-mission flicks and revisionist westerns that enamoured him so much through his trilogy of blood-soaked period pieces.
However, he doesn’t necessarily have to have seen any given picture to decide one of its key elements would fit perfectly into his filmography, as evidenced by the John Wayne movie he pilfered from despite the fact the two-time Academy Award winner has never actually gotten around to watching it.
‘The Duke’ made his feature-length directorial debut with 1960’s The Alamo, a production that wasn’t without its issues. Nobody would regard it among the top tier of Wayne’s onscreen efforts, and while Tarantino isn’t in a position to comment because he’s got no idea, he definitely appreciated the title track.
Written by Paul Francis Webster, composed by Dimitri Tiomkin, and performed by The Brothers Four, ‘The Green Leaves of Summer’ earned an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Original Song’. Almost 50 years later, it got a second lease of life when the version performed by Nick Perito appeared in the title sequence of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
“Oddly enough, I’ve never actually seen The Alamo itself,” Tarantino admitted to NPR over how the song from Wayne’s first stint behind the camera ended up in his World War II saga. “So I don’t really have the association of ‘The Green Leaves of Summer’ as being The Alamo theme.”
The way it worked into the filmmaker’s eardrums makes perfect sense, though, after he discovered the song through his love of a genre Wayne wouldn’t be caught dead in. “Oddly enough, I grew up watching kung fu movies,” he explained. “They would use the theme ‘The Green Leaves of Summer’ in a lot of needle drops in kung fu movies.”
Tarantino was “more familiar with it in a Bruce Lee movie than I was actually from the John Wayne film,” but it nonetheless created a direct connection between the icons of disparate eras when he lifted the title track from the actor’s self-directed passion project and used it as the backdrop to one of his own.
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