Before the farm and the first line of dialogue, The Green Leaves of Summer sets a measured musical opening. The version heard is credited to Nick Perito.
A theme from The Alamo, a recording by Nick Perito
The Green Leaves of Summer was born for The Alamo, the 1960 John Wayne film, with music by Dimitri Tiomkin and lyrics by Paul Francis Webster. In the opening credits of Inglourious Basterds, an instrumental performance credited to Nick Perito is used. It is necessary to separate the authorship of the song from the identity of the recording Tarantino selects.
Saying that the theme comes from The Alamo does not mean that the audio was taken directly from that film's soundtrack. A composition can circulate through different arrangements, versions and records. Perito's performance has its own sonic shape, and it is that shape that organises Tarantino's opening.
The absence of a voice singing the lyrics changes the relationship with the images. The viewer receives a melody without words telling them about characters, places or events. Those who know the song may recall its origin; those who do not recognise it may perceive its musical character without needing any prior information. The film title and the credits have room to appear within that listening.
This opening should also not be confused with The Verdict, the Morricone fragment associated with the approach to the farm. The film uses different pieces for the credits and for the start of the action. Recognising the change makes it possible to hear how the music shifts from preparing a general mood to intervening in a specific dramatic situation.
An opening that does not begin with an attack
The melodic and relatively restrained character of the fragment delays the expectation of a thunderous warlike entrance. The film does not need to begin with the noise of battle to announce that it will deal with violence. It can first offer a moment of listening and reserve immediate danger for the later arrival of the characters.
The credits create a zone before the story. During that stretch, the music can relate to the design of the names, the length of their appearances and the presentation of the title without being obliged to follow the movement of a body within the fiction. It is a way of organising the viewer's access to the film before a scene claims their attention.
The origin of a theme linked to the western allows us to hear a memory of that genre. That association does not turn the opening into a statement about the whole story of The Alamo, nor does it establish a political equivalence between the two films. The borrowing can work through tone and cinematic tradition, without automatically carrying across all the meanings of the earlier work.
The choice also encourages a feeling of a story remembered or told from a certain distance. This is a reading of the musical effect, not a claim about what every viewer must feel. An instrumental melody can produce melancholy, calm or anticipation depending on how it is heard. The film makes use of that emotional opening before specifying a threat in the first sequence.
The recognisable melody can work even when the viewer does not know its name. The cinematic borrowing does not require an examination of references in order to produce an effect. Those who identify The Alamo add one association; those who only hear the instrumental version still receive its tempo and melodic contour. This dual possibility allows the opening to function as both an immediate experience and an invitation to recognise a memory of cinema, without one mode of listening invalidating the other.
Starting with music before entering the chapter
The separation between credits and the first chapter is consistent with a narrative that marks its divisions. The audience receives a presentation of the work and then an entry into a space, a date and a situation. The music helps ensure that those moments are not confused, even though they form part of a continuous beginning.
In the use of chapters and prologues in Tarantino, thresholds have a practical function: they prepare a change in attention. Here the melody allows us to pause on the fact of cinema before observing a family faced with the arrival of a visitor. The initial calm does not guarantee safety for that family; it belongs to another scale of the story.
Listening to the piece outside the film can produce a different experience. Without the credits and without the transition to the farm, Perito's recording remains, but the expectation the film builds around it disappears. That is why the function of a theme cannot be explained solely by listing its author and origin. It also depends on where it begins, what images it accompanies and what comes next.
Within the Inglourious Basterds soundtrack, The Green Leaves of Summer fulfils a very specific task: it opens the listening without foreshadowing the entire repertoire that follows. Its delicacy does not contradict the later violence. It establishes a starting point that that violence will transform, and it allows the first threat to register as a perceptible alteration of a time that had begun in a different way.
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