The Great Silence

1968 was a banner year for "spaghetti Westerns" -- Sergio Leone's majestic Once upon a Time in the West premiered in that year as did Sergio Corbucci's bizarre The Great Silence.  Leone's picture is now regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made transcending its genre; Corbucci's film, with more limited appeal, is sometimes considered the greatest of all spaghetti Westerns and an exemplar of the form.   I remain skeptical about Corbucci's movie -- it is certainly remarkable enough, but shares certain characteristics with its villain, Loco, played by Klaus Kinski:  the German actor is compelling and you can't take your eyes off him, but he is also soul-less and a cipher, more of a killing machine than a credible character.  Corbucci exploits Kinski's startling eyes and his curiously feminine appearance (he is a bit like 
the young Christopher Walken), but the performance is more freakish than anything else.

Corbucci's The Great Silence is a "snow western."  The film seems to have shot in the high mountains, apparently the Dolomites on the border between Italy and what was once Yugoslavia.  Deep snow covers the landscape and the horses sometimes stumble and fall and are trapped by the drifts.  There are many spectacular shots showing a minute lone horseman (or sometimes a posse) navigating vast expanses of snow cradled in rugged mountains.  Ennio Morricone's accompanying music is justly famous -- the soundtrack ranges from plaintive folk-song-like melodies, to a main theme (used by Tarantino in the Hateful Eight, his homage to this film) that somehow combines a poignant melody with a driving rhythm simulating a horse's canter; in one sequence, a column of vicious bounty hunters crosses a mountain slope to a barbaric jangle of drums and shrieking horns.  Everything about the movie is impressive and it's horrific ending is genuinely surprising and, even today, more than a little disconcerting.  But despite the praise lavished upon this film by many critics -- the Scottish director Alex Cox (Repo Man and Sid and Nancy) greatly admires the movie -- the picture seems more than a little hollow to me:  mostly a misanthropic excuse for a series of brutal fights and gun-battles. 

The film's plot seems to harken back to the experiences of some Italians during World War Two.  Although set in Utah, the movie could be about partisans in the Po River Valley and, indeed, bears some resemblance to the bloody last episode in Rossellini's Paisan.  A group of about 20 bandits (like partisans) has been driven into the high Sierra.  The group includes several women and some men who are armed only with ominous-looking scythes.  The bandits are farmers and ranchers who are the victims of some sort of land-grab by the villainous Mr. Pollicut, a store owner in Snow Hill, the Utah town where the action takes place.  Pollicut has refused to sell food to the so-called bandits forcing them to raid his store -- on this pretext, Pollicut has persuaded the authorities to put bounties on the heads of the bandits.  Bounty hunters, led by El Tigrero ("the little tiger" but inexplicably called "Loco" in the subtitles) are systematically hunting down the bandits and murdering them for prize money.  It is no surprise that the bounty hunters are led by Klaus Kinski -- obviously a German although, of course, everyone speaks poorly dubbed Italian on the Film Movement Classics DVD recently issued.  (The film, particularly the final massacre, seems to derive directly from war-time trauma.)  Into this deadly terrain there comes a stranger, a man with no name, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant  -- this character is mute but has a peculiar machine-gun like pistol that he uses to mow down his enemies.  When the bounty hunters try to ambush him, he kills about a half dozen of them and, then, for a good measure shoots off the thumbs of one of the bad hombre -- without thumbs you can't fire a revolver.  Trintignant's character looks like Clint Eastwood in Leone's trilogy and acts like him.  But he's more damaged -- when he was a child, bad guys cut his throat and destroyed his larynx.  Thus, he is mute:  hence, his moniker "Silence".  "Why is he called 'Silence'?"  "Because wherever he goes he leaves behind him the silence of death."  When three bandits, tired of freezing in the cold mountains, depart for the village, Kinski kills them all and, then, commandeers a stagecoach to transport the frozen corpses to Snow Hill -- these sequences are source material for Tarantino's Hateful Eight.  In Snow Hill, there is a new sheriff played by Frank Wolff, an ubiquitous presence in Italian Westerns and always excellent, a kind uber-character actor.  Along the way, Kinski has gunned down an African-American bandit.  The man's wife declares that she will revenge herself on the bounty-hunter.  Most of the film concerns this woman's efforts to persuade Silence to gun down Kinski's Loco.  Ultimately, Silence tries to goad Loco into a gun duel but this fails.  Kinski beats up Silence and he gets wounded by gunfire from one of the other bounty hunters.  The Black woman seeking revenge nurses the wounded Silence and enlivens her care with some sex as well.  Loco kills the sheriff by shooting around his feet so that he falls through the ice into a frozen river.   Pollicut and his henchman break into the Black woman's cabin, rape her, and mutilate Silence by holding his gun-hand in a brazier full of red hot coals.  (Silence retaliates by burning off the bad guy's face by pushing him head down into the brazier.)  The bandits have been lured into town and are held hostage in the saloon.  Pollicut turns out to be the monster who cut out the eight-year-old Silence's voice-box.  Silence kills him and, then, goes to rescue the bandits that Loco is holding hostage in the tavern.  But Silence's hands don't work and this is particularly true after one of Loco's villains shoots off some of his fingers on his unburned hand.  Loco guns down Silence and the African-American woman who has run to his side.  Then, Loco's men massacre the twenty or so bandits (and their women).  So the film ends. 

The final sequences in the movie were shot at a Western town location built at Cinecitta near Rome and principal photography was completed there in the mid-summer of 1967.  This means that the snow in Snow Hill is comprised of 20,000 gallons of shaving cream -- and the effect doesn't really work compared to the snow in the vast mountain landscapes featured in the rest of the film.  The Great Silence is completely nihilistic and, therefore, fundamentally pointless.  It's impressive enough and the ending is shocking; the whole film leaves you with a disorienting sense of futility that is deeply unpleasant.  Corbucci must have understood this because he shot two alternative endings -- one of them is conventionally upbeat:  the sheriff is resurrected, rides to the rescue, and there is a spectacular gun-battle in which Kinski and his minions are all killed and the hostages freed.  (Silence participates in the fight because his burned hand has been protected by a kind of metal gauntlet.)  The other ending is simply unresolved.  Loco kills Silence but, then, ushers his bad men out of the saloon without murdering all of the partisans.  Both alternate endings are shot with genuine authority and, I think, Corbucci himself didn't know exactly how to finish the film.  Ultimately, of course, he opted for the most vicious and savage ending. 

In all Italian Westerns, I feel that there is a piece missing, a sort of hollowness.  The Italians understand the outward appearance of Westerns, can replicate that appearance and, even, make significant improvements to it -- but they don't grasp the soul of the genre.  Hollywood Westerns generally involve characters forced to make some kind of moral choice.  In the absence of law and order, the characters are compelled to act ethically but without ordinary constraints -- they take the law into their own hands but, usually, in the interest of a larger good.  The great theme of the American Western is the taming of the West -- the bringing of civilization to the wilderness.  Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West explores this theme and, for this reason, it transcends the genre of the bloody and nihilistic spaghetti Western from which it arises:  the train comes to Sweetwater; the men continue to lay tracks and Mrs. McBain (Claudia Cardinale) bring them water while the last of the outlaws bleeds to death in a vacant lot.  (The effect is like McCabe dying in the snowstorm while the rest of the town rushes to put out a fire in a Church that no one ever attended.)  Corbucci's film has no real characters -- everyone is driven by relentless fury, vengeance, and the people in the move are merely robots, acting on implacable impulses to kill or be killed that they can't control.  The great themes of the American Western are nowhere in evidence and, in fact, The Great Silence, seems to me to be a meditation on the atrocities committed in World War II by the Germans or Italian authorities acting under Mussolini.   This is characteristic of Italian Westerns -- something horrible has happened in the past that drives the characters to murder one another.  The Great Silence looks like a Western, indeed, it's gloriously beautiful, but it's not really a film of that kind.