Left Field Cinema

The Great Silence is a 1968 frozen-spaghetti-western, the greatest western Klaus Kinski ever did and one infamous for its killer ending and drifter who never speaks, Sergio Corbucci. Unfolding in Utah during the Great Blizzard of 1899, il grande silenzio or The Big Silence is the great revenge tale of Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant), muted as a child by bounty hunters, he has since held a grudge against all, commonly aggravating and killing any he encounters. One of poor surviving through the winter is Pauline, whose husband is hunted and killed by Lolo the bounty hunter (Klaus Kinski).

Pauline decides to avenge her fathers death, hiring Silence, through the terrain he also helps a group of outlawed Mormons and comes across the sheriff (Frank Wolff) who is utterly lost in to snow, trying to bring order to the mountains, Loco uses the sheriff’s weak-in-mind to lure Silence, having met him, to another face off, trying to again provoke the mute…

Sergio wrote the screenplay with others including his younger Bruno, the delivery making up for the dialogue not being as sharp as many of the spaghetti westerns, Great Silence being his third great western to that point along with Django and Navajo Joe, bigger successes which never lead to anything out side of westerns though he did try his hand at some comedies which I haven’t seen any of. Klaus Kinski is ‘loco’, he doesn’t need to act, being so naturally magnetic, The Morricone score is very good, tunes that precursor the magnificent score for Duck You Sucker, his most psychedelic, epic number.

Silvano Ippoliti’s cinematography is good and serviceable, many talk of the great imagery in acid and red westerns but it wasn’t till the revisionist western of 2007, The Assassination of Jesses James by the Coward Robert Ford, that a cinematographer like Roger Deakins ventured out west (really north to Canada) to give a poetic-realism sense of the Civil War times for gunslingers near the rocky mountains, if you like you’re frozen western I’d only suggest Jeremiah Jackson with Robert Redford if you like overtly drawn-out westerns like Dances With Wolves.

The original infamous ending has merit and fault, Loco is a patient man, though a man is doubtful given that he kills woman and child, overall you’ve actually got this sort of mountain-county where bounty hunters seem to outnumber the peacekeepers and police, which makes for ending that relies purely on silence to ‘save the day’ so… I guess an ending like Great Silence’s (all in the title) is the only way Michael Haneke will praise a movie, its amazing that he’d like a Corbucci film, his films are violent-gloried and beautifully shot, things Haneke hates the audience for, according to him, you and I should only like movies horribly realised and shot, I guess like his.

It was purely through Trintigant that the hero was realized as a mute. For a low-budget filmmaker I would agree that there are some good political and revolution subtexts in most of his westerns, being 1969’s The Mercenary and 1970’s Companeros. Anyways as the great frozen-spaghetti western pulp-story, Corbucci was first and best equipped to give the overall genre, the first in his revolution-trilogy of 1968-70, The Great Silence for me is the best spaghetti western and maybe the best western drama (excluding My Name is Nobody, the Blazing-Saddles of spaghetti’s western, both released in 1973) till the more greater, grander cult classic of Dead Man in 1995.

Darcy S. McCallum