The Great Silence

For the next few weeks I'm going to watching some Spaghetti Westerns, or Italian Westerns. They were made in Europe, mostly by Italians, in the '60s and '70s. Most notably are the ones made by Sergio Leone, such as his "Man with No Name" trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West, but there were more than 600 made in twenty years, so there are plenty more to view.

After Leone the most prominent director of these was Sergio Corbucci. His The Great Silence of 1968 shows how diverse the casts could be. He is Italian, the film was shot in the Pyrenees, and his two leads are a Frenchman and a German. It has many of the prerequisites of the genre, including a score by Ennio Morricone, but it has one of the bleakest endings I've ever seen.

The "Silence" of the title is a mute gunman, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. He hates bounty hunters, because they killed his parents and slit his throat, making him unable to talk. The film presents bounty hunters (often called "bounty killers") as evil, blood-thirsty scum, in particular one called Loco, played by Kinski (playing a character called Loco seems like typecasting to him). When Loco kills the husband of a black woman (Vonetta McGee) she hires Silence to kill him.

In some ways this plot is similar to Unforgiven, but just in the idea that a woman is hiring a man to kill another man. What's more interesting is the multiple layers here. Silence hires himself to kill bounty hunters, but that makes him a bounty hunter as well, just a specialized one. I guess he was also sort of like Dexter.

Unlike many of the Spaghetti Westerns, is not set in the desert but in the deep snows of Utah, which Corbucci makes excellent use of. The film is dubbed, and sometimes very badly, but I expect I'll be getting used to that.

What sets this film apart is the ending, and I'll put out a spoiler alert now. All film we are expecting the showdown between Silence and Loco, and we get it. But, turning the Western genre on its head, Loco kills Silence, McGee (who has fallen in love with Silence) and an entire room full of innocent people. An alternate "happy ending," available on the DVD, was shot for Asian and North African audiences, who apparently would not tolerate anything else. I'm not sure what it says about Europeans and North Americans that we could tolerate it.