Why One of the Best Spaghetti Westerns Ever Was Never Released in the States

 This 1960s Spaghetti Western subverted every genre trope, and U.S. distributors were not happy.

Collider

By Aled Owen

October 7, 2023

While Sergio Leone's "Man With No Name" trilogy climaxed in the mid-1960s with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, another Spaghetti Western director was experiencing his own international success story. 1966's Django made such a huge splash for director Sergio Corbucci that nearly 40 other Spaghetti Westerns set to release in the following years were renamed to include the name "Django" and ride on the coattails of Corbucci's success. Of course, it also went on to inspire 2012's Django Unchained written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, and the 2023 series from Sky/Canal+. In 1987, Corbucci would eventually direct the only official sequel, Django Strikes Again, but his true follow-up came only two years after Django when he made Il Grande Silenzio — also known as The Great Silence.

The '60s were a time of great change worldwide, both culturally and politically. As such, Hollywood's long line of conservative Westerns (a la John Ford and John Wayne) were oppressed by the gritty reality of "mud and blood", as Corbucci himself put it. Shot largely in Italy, the Spaghetti Western's disassociation with the real American West setting gave it the perspective to tell its stories in an unadulterated warts-and-all manner. Although Corbucci expressed disdain for the hippie culture of the '60s, he was an undeniable leftist and anti-authoritarian. His films explored his politics but were largely consumed by conservatives, making for the perfect Trojan Horse for his ideas. However, with The Great Silence, its pessimistic ending was too much, and the film was not released in the United States until the new millennium.

From the very opening of The Great Silence, Sergio Corbucci flips the script. In an era when bounty killers became the only conceivable way of policing the great frontiers, groups of innocent "outlaws" hid in the wild, weathering the elements in the hopes of evading the bloodthirsty, money-hungry men paid to kill them for profit (led by Klaus Kinski's Loco). That's where our hero comes in, a mute known only as Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant). As a killer of killers, Silence becomes a symbol, striking fear into the hearts of those who make money from senselessly killing men and women without a trial. From the very start, the film swaps the traditional archetypes, showing us a world much grayer than the black-and-white world of '50s Westerns, and the poignancy of this idea continues to this day.

According to Repo Man director and Corbucci historian Alex Cox, "Corbucci apparently was moved, not by the more celebrated murders of Robert Kennedy or Dr. Martin Luther King, but by the deaths of Che Guevara and Malcolm X. He was something of a leftist, and he apparently made Grande Silenzio as a tribute to those two revolutionary fighters." Shot in the Italian Alps (doubling for 1899 Utah), the story also sees Silence fall in love with the widow of one of Loco's victims, a strong-willed African-American woman named Pauline (Vonetta McGee). Their interracial romance alluded to the ongoing Civil Rights movement in the United States, but that wasn't what made 20th Century Fox refuse to release The Great Silence in the States.

The U.S. distribution rights were bought by 20th Century Fox as a gift for actor Clint Eastwood whose success in Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns made him Hollywood's go-to gunslinger and a successor to the aging John Wayne. The idea was for Eastwood to star in an English-language remake of Il Grande Silenzio in the role of the mute gunfighter. 20th Century Fox's Darryl Francis Zanuck was shown a screening of the Italian original and was offended by its cynical ending in which the wounded Silence tries and fails to save the innocent outlaws and is killed alongside his lover at the hand of the brutal and unstoppable bounty killers.

"He swallowed his cigar and said, '20th Century Fox would never release this picture!'" stated Cox, who went on to reveal that Corbucci had expected this and shot two alternate endings for the film, as seen in the Blu-ray release. One sees the hero effortlessly kill all his enemies and liberate the bounties, making for an unearned happy ending "of such cynical and bizarre proportions that it's unbelievable." The second alternate ending feels somewhere in-between, with Silence being shot and one of Loco's men leaving the building calmly. This bittersweet ending is vague and bizarre. As a result, Fox released the film in foreign territories but not in the States. As for Eastwood, the project was developed into a completely unrelated movie called, Joe Kidd.

For decades, the film endured, being passed around during its second life on home video, and even garnered a cult following. It became a legendary film, sought out by cinephiles and collectors until 2012, the year of Tarantino's Spaghetti Western part revival, part homage Django Unchained. With Spaghetti Westerns back in the zeitgeist and audiences hungry for the original movies that inspired the new Tarantino film, the demand for The Great Silence was prevalent. Under license from Beta Film, the film experienced its first U.S. theatrical release, when an English-dubbed 35mm print was toured around the country. Tarantino's follow-up The Hateful Eight would take lots of direct inspiration from The Great Silence specifically, with Little White Lies reporting, "With its snowed-in setting, homicidal bounty hunters and original Ennio Morricone score, [it] bears a striking resemblance to Italian director Sergio Corbucci’s blood-soaked Spaghetti Western from 1968."

The Great Silence subverted every trope established by the genre before it, stripping it down to reveal what truly matters in the genre. It exchanges the great Western desert plains for the snowy wasteland of the 1899 blizzard. It swaps the roles of the traditional law enforcers and the man in black. It gave its female heroine a three-dimensional character. And of course, most shockingly, it subverts expectations by having the villains win and the hero loses. How then can this possibly be part of the Western genre if it breaks almost all its rules? Because, in short, it's only by deconstructing the genre that we are able to truly define it, and in the case of The Great Silence, Corbucci makes it clear that all a Western needs is a character with a moral view of right and wrong who lives and dies by that code... even if it's not to 20th Century Fox's liking!