Corbucci's The Great Silence

Jean-Louis Trintignant as Silence.

The most acclaimed Spaghetti Western filmmaker not named Sergio Leone. 

That's an apt description for Sergio Corbucci, a prolific Italian director and screenwriter whose career spanned four decades. Although he directed comedies, horror films, and sand-and-scandal epics, Corbucci is best known for his Spaghetti Westerns, especially Django (1966). Inspired by his friend Leone, Corbucci crafted a violent, allegorical Western that generated dozens of imitations and grew in critical stature over the years. Still, many critics now consider it Corbucci's second-best film--hailing The Great Silence as his masterpiece.

Released in 1968, The Great Silence takes place in Utah during the Great Blizzard of 1899. Starving men, who have become outlaws, have hidden in the snowy mountains with their families awaiting amnesty from the governor. A group of bounty hunters, based in a small town called Snow Hill, are killing the outlaws for the rewards. As one of the bounty hunters notes, each man's bounty is small but they add up if you kill enough of them.

Klaus Kinski as a bounty hunter.

Enter a mute gunfighter known only as Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who is willing to kill anyone for money. To avoid being pursued by the law, Silence only kills in self-defense--sometimes provoking his enemies to reach for their guns first. Silence helps out the outlaws and later accepts "payment" from a widow to kill her husband's murderer. Of course, Silence has his own agenda in Snow Hill—which is revealed as The Great Silence reaches its climax.

There are critics who hail The Great Silence as a political or anti-capital allegory. I'm not sure about that, because you could probably make similar claims about any number of Westerns pitting ranchers against settlers. I believe it's the setting and the ending that make The Great Silence stand out among other Spaghetti Westerns.

The film is seemingly bathed in white snow. I'm hard-pressed to think of a snowier movie, though perhaps the 1993 film version of Ethan Frome comes close. In both movies, the dark skies and the flat white drifts provide a blanket of bleakness. The characters wrap any available scrap of cloth around their faces to stay warm. The horses trudge through high snow, sometimes collapsing to the ground in exhaustion. It's a visually grim landscape that is perfect for the inevitable ending that lurks behind every frame of The Great Silence.

As for that ending, I won't include any spoilers in this review. Let's just say it's unconventional and was the reason that Richard Zanuck refused to release the movie in the U.S. To appease his producers, Corbucci shot two alternate endings, though it's possible that neither one was actually used.

Is The Great Silence a Spaghetti Western masterpiece? No. It lacks the vivid characters and splendid set pieces of Leone's films. It's missing the brutal passion that made Django memorable. Neither of those criticisms implies that it's not worth a viewing. 

Vonetta McGee as Pauline.

Klaus Kinski gives one of his best performances as one of the villains, a vile rascal who is surprisingly intelligent (e.g., he refuses to be provoked by Silence, knowing that he would lose a gunfight). And Vonetta McGee gives an quiet understated performance as the widow who hires Silence. She would later star in the equally unconventional Blaxploitation Western Thomsine & Bushrod (1974).

Django, The Great Silence, and The Specialists (1969) are sometimes referred to as Corbucci's  Mud and Blood Trilogy.