The Great Silence [Il Grande Silenzio]

Sergio Corbucci, France/Italy, 1968, 101 minutes

Amidst a snow-drenched landscape two gunmen engage in a deadly game of cat and mouse.

The enigmatic, mute Silence (Jean-Louis Tritignant) has taken it upon himself to defend a group of religious dissidents outlawed by the mayor of the territory and hunted by vicious bounty killer Loco (Klaus Kinski). Silence always draws second and shoots first, thereby ensuring that his actions are justifiable as self-defence. Loco knows this and refuses to let himself be provoked, continuing his profitable campaign of legalised murder all the while. Finally, inevitably, the two men have their showdown. Who will prevail?

With The Great Silence Sergio Corbucci delivered not merely one of the great spaghetti westerns but also the great westerns, taking the bounty hunter and revenge motifs of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher's 1950s cycles with James Stewart and Randolph Scott and giving them that distinctively Italian twist. Yet it's not so much the mysterious and laconic man with no name - with Silence surely representing the logical conclusion of the type while affording Tritignant the opportunity to deliver an acting masterclass in the power of the small gesture - nor the explicit representation of violence that emerge as the major developments so much as the thoroughgoing moral ambiguity and pessimistic fatalism, with Corbucci's original vision encompassing such a devastatingly downbeat conclusion that backers demanded he reshoot it.

But did he? Come and See!

Review by Michel Gentil
Written for EUFS Programme Spring 2004