Review of The Great Silence (1968) by Conner R — 15 Feb 2010

Spaghetti westerns were a darker, grittier affair than the ones that were coming out of Hollywood at the time, and it doesn't get any darker in the genre than Sergio Corbucci's THE GREAT SILENCE.

The movie is about a mute gunman known as Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who has a vendetta against bounty hunters (or "bounty killers" as they're known here) and kills them for money at the behest of families who have lost loved ones over a fistful of blood money.

He happens upon a town called Snow Hill in the snow-blanketed hills of Utah, where a black woman has recently lost her husband to a bounty killer named Loco (played with menacing, subdued lunacy by the great Klaus Kinski).

She hires Silence to kill Loco, but nothing goes as planned. Spaghetti Westerns were great because they were genre-busting flicks that took an established, American genre, and flipped them over. The sets were dustier and displayed the wear and tear of the frontier, and the landscapes were just as rich and detailed as the faces of the characters.

Plus the line between good and evil wasn't so defined, and the protagonists were often anti-heroes. No spaghetti westerns defies genre convention as openly as THE GREAT SILENCE, to say everything as to why would spoil the film, you'll just have to see it.

A few things that are interesting is the gorgeous snow-blasted setting, which has that world-worn authentic feel that Italian westerns often have, and the similarities between the nature of the hero (Silence) and the villain (Loco) are also well thought out.

I could go on and on since this movie is so interesting, but I'll cut myself off. This is one of the best spaghetti westerns I've seen, it's up there with Leone's work, and is head and shoulders above Corbucci's other famous work in the genre, DJANGO.

A must-see for not only fans of westerns, but cinema in general.