The Great Silence (1968)

Original title

Il grande silenzio

Directed by

Sergio Corbucci

Genre

drama film, Spaghetti Western

Country

France, Italy

Runtime

1h 45m

Rated

12

Rating

7.5 of 10 from 462 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A mute gunslinger defends a group of outlaws and a vengeful widow from ruthless bounty killers in Utah during the Great Blizzard of 1899. The film is set against a corrupt banker and a harsh wintry landscape.

bleakslow-burntensemelancholicpolitically chargedvisually starkunsettlinggrittysnowy

What happens

The Great Silence (Italian: Il grande silenzio) is a 1968 revisionist spaghetti Western film directed and co-written by Sergio Corbucci. An Italian-French co-production, the film stars Jean-Louis Trintignant, Klaus Kinski, Vonetta McGee (in her film début) and Frank Wolff, with Luigi Pistilli, Mario Brega, Marisa Merlini and Carlo D'Angelo in supporting roles. Conceived by Corbucci as a politically-charged allegory inspired by the deaths of Che Guevara and Malcolm X, the film's plot takes place in Utah prior to the Great Blizzard of 1899. It pits a mute gunslinger (Trintignant), fighting in the defence of a group of outlaws and a vengeful young widow (McGee), against a group of ruthless bounty killers led by "Loco" (Kinski) and the corrupt banker Henry Pollicut (Pistilli). Unlike most films of the genre, which were filmed in the Almería province of Spain to double for areas such as Texas and Mexico, The Great Silence was primarily filmed on location in the Italian Dolomites. Distributed in most territories by 20th Century Fox, The Great Silence was theatrically released to a mediocre commercial reception in Italy, but it fared better in other countries. Controversial for its bleak and dark tone, the film's reputation grew, and it gained a cult following in the wake of its release. The film was finally released in the United States in 2001, when it was made available on DVD by Fantoma Films and Image Entertainment; in Britain, it was first shown in 1990 on the BBC2 program Moviedrome. Having received several theatrical re-releases, most notably in 2012 and 2017, The Great Silence is now widely regarded by fans and authorities on Spaghetti Westerns as one of the greatest films of the genre, and is acknowledged as Corbucci's masterpiece. Praise has gone to the acting, the utilization of snowbound landscapes, Ennio Morricone's score, and the film's subversion of several conventions of the Western film genre. Retrospective critics and scholars of Corbucci's Westerns have also deemed The Great Silence to be the second film in the director's "Mud and Blood" trilogy, which also includes Django (1966) and The Specialists (1969). (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

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