ART OF SONG
David Bowie
“Cat People (Putting Out The Fire)”
Inglourious Basterds (Soundtrack)
2009 | MCA

Few auteurs can claim mastery of both the art of filmmaking and the art of filmmaking scores as categorically as Quentin Tarantino. Starting with his spot-on use of a harmonically gleeful “Stuck in the Middle with You” smack dab in the middle of the violence of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino has gone on to engrave a series of unforgettable song-scene associations on the celluloid consciousness. This tradition continues with his latest achievement, Inglourious Basterds, a film that does its own fair share of engraving—not only through the auspices of music, but through the machete-skilled hands of Brad Pitt’s backwoods brigadier, Aldo Raine (whose canvas consists of the foreheads of captured and defected Nazis).

The scene which sonically steals the show comes toward the film’s incendiary finale, courtesy of David Bowie’s “Cat People [Putting Out Fire].” Originally made with producer Giorgio Morodor for inclusion in Paul Shrader’s 1982 film Cat People (a remake of the 1942 horror film of the same name), Bowie re-recorded the song for his 1983 album Let’s Dance. Tarantino snatches the original soundtrack version from the shallow depths of the ’80s and places it in the vengeful hands of fantasy WWII heroine Shoshanna Dreyfus. Shoshanna is a French Jew who escapes from the countryside to Paris after witnessing the horrific murder of her family at the hands of SD officer (and Shoshanna’s main target), Hans Landa, and conveniently lands a job as a cinema proprietor after her theatre-owning relatives pass away.
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