Spaghetti westerns were a genre that would be programmed on SBS Saturday Cult Movie Night and I remember seeing the end of The Great Silence (1968; Il Grande Silenzio) when I was younger. Recently, the film is referenced as an influence on Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, name dropped as one of the filmmaker’s favourite westerns. However, it is bleaker than Tarantino’s work and as a snowbound western, the terrain looks more challenging and difficult here (shot in the Italian Dolemites). Directed by Sergio Corbucci (of the original Django and The Mercenary) and scored by Ennio Morricone (the title track is one of his most beautiful, haunting western themes), it focuses on a man named Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who is a mute and fights with a semi-automatic pistol. His mythic, angelic quality is complicated by his morality of only killing in self-defense and shooting the thumbs off those who cross him. However, he stands on the side of good in the troubles of Snow Hill, a small town whose business merchants pay bounty killers to murder outlaws, a particular community who only steal to survive and live in hiding outside the town. An outlaw’s widow (Vonetta McGee) hires Silence to get revenge, specifically against Loco (Klaus Kinski), the most ruthless of the bounty killers, even though he acts appeasingly and demure to the town’s comically gruff sheriff (Frank Wolff, one of the recognisable faces from Sergio Leone westerns alongside other actors like Luigi Pistilli and Mario Brega). Apparently, the director was influenced by the assassinations of Che Guevara and Malcolm X, and there is a political allegory to its depiction of cruelty and doom. The Great Silence preempts the cynical revisionism of an American western like McCabe And Mrs Miller or Heaven’s Gate, and stands out from the spaghetti western genre with its atmosphere, characterisation and closing act. Recommended.
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