“The Great Silence” Review by Fred Blosser

 Cinema Retro

Review: “The Great Silence” (1968), starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Klaus Kinski, Vonetta McGee, and Frank Wolff; directed by Sergio Corbucci; Film Movement Classics 50th anniversary Blu-ray edition (2018) by Fred Blosser

“The Great Silence,” an Italian Western by Sergio Corbucci, has received a handsome 50th Anniversary release on Blu-ray from Film Movement Classics.  Fans will be happy to see such recognition for a movie that hardly caused a stir when it was released in 1968, and in fact never played in U.S. theaters at all.  In traditional Westerns, heroes like The Virginian and Shane are men of few words because they choose not to talk much.  Corbucci’s black-clad hero is known as “Silence” because he can’t talk at all.  His throat was slashed, severing his vocal cords, when he was a boy.  But “silence” also carries a symbolic, almost fetishist connotation for the character.  “He’s called Silence,” it’s said of the supernaturally omnipresent pistoleer, “because wherever he goes, the silence of Death follows.”   Corbucci’s plot unfolds against a beautiful but pitiless mountain landscape, dominated by its own “great silence” of winter ice and snow -- at least, until gunshots ring out and Ennio Morricone’s musical score pounds across the soundtrack, reflecting the desperation of Corbucci’s characters with its clanging, shrieking instrumentation.  

In Corbucci’s bleak story, newly appointed Sheriff Gideon Burnett (Frank Wolff) is dispatched to remote Snow Hill, Utah, to quell rampant banditry by offering amnesty to the lawbreakers.  There, powerful, entrenched interests resent his intrusion.  Because they profit from the disorder, and in fact are its root cause, they’re happy with things just the way they are.  Store owner, banker, and justice of the peace Henry Pollicut (Luigi Pistilli) drives homesteaders into debt, and when they default, forecloses on their property, leaving them destitute.  Once displaced, they flee into the mountains and survive by stealing, like Paul Muni’s character in 1932’s “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.”  Rewards are placed on their heads and collected by Loco (Klaus Kinski) and his posse of bounty hunters.  As long as this system perpetuates itself, the bounty hunters enjoy a thriving livelihood, and invariably they deliver their prey dead.  One of Loco’s victims is black, prompting the blond, blue-eyed killer to marvel: “What times we live in, when a black man is worth as much as a white one.”  Wearing a cable-knit scarf down his neck that looks like the chain-mail of a medieval Teutonic Knight, Kinski delivers the line with unsettling, offhand, bemused diffidence.  The victim’s vengeful widow Pauline (Vonetta McGee) enlists Silence to call out the bounty hunter and gun him down.

As Corbucci reveals in quick, Sergio Leone-style flashbacks, Pauline’s consuming hatred for Loco (called Tigrero in the original Italian-language version) is rivaled by a simmering enmity between Silence and Pollicut.  Years before, in carrying out evictions as a deputy, Pollicut had gunned down Silence’s parents and cut the boy’s throat to render him mute, thus unable to identify Pollicut as the culprit.  In turn, once grown into gunslinging adulthood, Silence shot off Pollicut’s thumbs to end his nemesis’ gun-toting career.  You have to go along here with Corbucci and his scriptwriters, and accept an apparent lapse of logic.  Why hadn’t Pollicut, at the outset, simply murdered the kid along with the parents, and saved himself the later pain and fuss?

Then again, this was a common Spaghetti Western convention: the killer who leaves a loose end, only to face payback years later.  Luigi Pistilli may have felt a sense of deja vu as Pollicut.  He’d already played a similarly careless villain, Walcott, in 1966’s “Death Rides a Horse.” There, Pistilli’s character kills a father, mother, and daughter but neglects to eliminate the young son who grows up to become John Philip Law’s avenging Bill Mesita.  The viewer may experience deja vu too, since the incomparable  Spaghetti villain Mario Brega plays Pistilli’s henchman in both films. 

In Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West,” Henry Fonda’s hired gun, Frank, makes the same mistake as Pollicut by hanging a peon but letting the victim’s kid brother grow up to become Charles Bronson’s angel of death, Harmonica.  Leone’s picture, which debuted in Italy two weeks after Corbucci’s, is a sprawling, operatic, sentimental epic about the passing of the Old West.  Corbucci’s, shorter than Leone’s by an hour, is roughhewn and anything but nostalgic.  Expansive outdoor scenes of towering, snow-clad mountains (filmed in Italy’s Dolomites, standing in for the Rockies) are offset by others in cramped indoor locations, where Corbucci often uses closeups in naturalistic, cinéma vérité style to heighten a sense of tension and claustrophobia.  His story is set in 1898, the turn-of-the-century time frame that, in other Westerns, offers a convenient demarcation between the romantic frontier of myth and the modern “civilized” West.  The transition is exemplified in Silence’s gun, a new-style Mauser automatic pistol.  But Corbucci presents his Old West as a savage world of plutocracy gone berserk, about which no one in their right mind would feel nostalgic.  “You represent the law,” Loco tells the well-meaning but inept Sheriff Burnett, “but my law is survival.  Survival of the fittest.”  The ending suggests that the Twentieth Century will bring social change only to the extent that Loco and his hired killers may have to find a new line of work as the available supply of wanted “outlaws” runs out.   

 The story goes that “The Great Silence” was never released theatrically in the U.S. because 20th Century Fox president Darryl F. Zanuck was so appalled by Corbucci’s violence and nihilism that he put the movie on the shelf.  For many years, the film remained unavailable Stateside, although you could read tantalizing summaries in early books about Euro-Westerns.  Beginning in the late 1980s, you might find overseas VHS copies if you were a zealous Spaghetti fan with an all-region VCR, or third-generation, collector’s-market tapes through specialized mail-order suppliers. 

It wasn’t until 2001 that the film enjoyed an official release here, on DVD from Fantoma.  By that time it had gained a cult reputation as a lost classic, a precursor to later and better-known movies with a comparably pessimistic vision of the West, like “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” and “Heaven’s Gate.”  Quentin Tarantino named it as one of his favorites, and was inspired (if that’s the right word) to produce “The Hateful Eight” (2015).  Tarantino’s snowbound Western has a richer visual look than Corbucci’s, thanks to a bigger budget and modern advancements in filmmaking technology, but it’s Tarantino’s typically silly, bloated product.  Whatever its technical faults (like Pollicut’s jarringly phony prosthetic thumbs that Silence shoots off in the flashback scene), “The Great Silence” has a somber, provocative gravity, bolstered by solid performances and underscored visually in two pivotal scenes.  In one, the frozen corpses of men with prices on their heads are scooped out of snowbanks, where they’ve been kept in cold storage, and hauled onto the top of a stagecoach like sides of beef for delivery in town.  In the other, ragged fugitives huddle miserably at gunpoint as they await execution, men and women alike. 

For European audiences in 1968, such scenes may have stirred painful memories of the Nazis’ and Fascists’ merciless reprisals against the soldiers of the Resistance during World War II.  Corbucci’s allusion would have been hard to miss in Italy and France, only two decades after the war.  Had the film been released to American theaters, it’s a sure bet that the critics here would have overlooked or dismissed those political implications.  Stateside movie reviewers of the late 1960s might discuss the leftist underpinnings of prestigious European films like “The Battle of Algiers” and “Z,” but genre pictures like Spaghetti Westerns rarely received such serious consideration.  To the extent that the New York Times and other major outlets reviewed them at all, they did so mainly to castigate their violence, much as community groups nowadays unload on shooter’s-eye-view video games.  In 2018, sadly, Corbucci’s politics seem more relevant than ever.  You may be tempted to filter his portrait of an unjust economic and legal system, which marginalizes, demonizes, and preys upon the disadvantaged, through the latest reports from the White House and Wall Street on the evening news. 

Film Movement Classics’ Blu-ray disc presents “The Great Silence” in a sharp 2K digital restoration that includes both the English language and Italian language tracks for the movie, with English subtitles.  The bonus materials include two alternate endings that Corbucci had prepared in an attempt to slide the movie past censors.  One retains the nihilistic ending of the original, but attempts to soften it by editing out almost all of the explicit violence in the last five minutes.  The result is virtually incomprehensible.  The other ending provides a happy outcome for the good guys, rather than the hopeless one in the original.  It has a nutty, surrealistic charm, but its total disconnect in tone from the rest of the somber picture, and its rabbit-out-of-a-hat, nick-of-time rescue, wouldn’t have fooled even the densest viewer.  “Westerns Italian Style,” a 1968 documentary narrated by Frank Wolff, presents some interesting behind-the-scenes footage of Corbucci and Trintignant, as well as brief interviews with two other Spaghetti luminaries, Sergio Sollima and Enzo Castellari.  The voices are badly dubbed and the script is generally inane, but if you can ignore the campy vibe of the documentary, it offers some informative stuff in passing.   The disc also includes a new taped interview with Alex Cox, whose thoughts on Spaghettis are always worth listening to, and a handsome keepsake booklet by Simon Abrams.