The Great Silence

A group of settlers have been declared outlaws and bounties placed on their heads. To defend themselves against the bounty killers, the settlers hire Silence (Jean Louis Trintignant), a mute gunslinger who draws last but shoots first, "always in self-defence."

Believing that an amnesty is imminent, three of the settlers leave the mountains and head into town, only to fall prey to Loco (Klaus Kinski), the worst of the bounty killers.

Loco, however, is wise to Silence's game and knows that if he does not allow himself to be provoked into drawing his gun the mute will be unable to act.

Meanwhile, the new Governor sends the decent but none-too-bright Sheriff Burnett (Frank Wolff) in to restore law and order to Snow Hill, against the wishes of the town's de facto ruler, Pollicott (Luigi Pistilli).

The key word to describe this unusual spaghetti western, set in the snow-covered wilds of Utah at the very end of the 19th century, is downbeat.

While maybe not surpassing Sergio Leone's works in terms of visual style and somewhat derivate in aspects of its content, Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence manages to outdo all comers – Leone, Peckinpah, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Heaven's Gate – in terms of cynicism.

Leone's influential films may have offered a refreshing change from the clear-cut moralities and clean-cut heroes of the typical American western, but were equally conventional in other regards. Each of the Dollars trilogy finishs on a more or less upbeat tone with the villain defeated and order restored, while Once Upon a Time in the West serves as an elegy to end of a heroic, mythic era of larger-than-life archetypes.

Here Corbucci utterly demolishes all such romantic notions, presenting a world where evil proves triumphant and any sense of human decency is a fatal flaw such that when an end title announces the belated end of the bounty killers one is not mournful for the passing of an era.

Ennio Morricone's music – really more a set of simple motifs repeated and recombined at opportune moments – provides a simple but effective underscoring.

As the logical extension/reduction of the laconic Eastwoodian man with no name, Trintignant offers both an acting masterclass in expressive minimalism and a fascinating counterpoint to the expansive theatrics of Kinski, with both men also being well supported by a solid cast of genre faces like Mario Brega and Luigi Pistilli.

Fantoma's Region One DVD presents The Great Silence in 1.66:1 widescreen, though some truncated names on the credits lead one to suspect that the film might originally have been shot wider in 1.77 or 1.85:1. Some scratches are evident but overall the film looks good considering its vintage.

The sound is clear, though a persistent hiss means this is not a DVD to watch with the volume turned high.

The extras – the de rigeur trailer, a five minute-intro/commentary from Alex Cox and the alternative ending – are slight but perfectly formed. The last, in particular, really has to be seen to be believed: When the backers found the film too downbeat for some territories they ordered Corbucci reshoot the ending. He complied in word if not in spirit with a deus ex machina finale so preposterous that audiences would likely have been rolling in the aisles had it been used.

All told, The Great Silence is another good DVD from Fantoma, a company that is fast becoming a label to trust when it comes to interesting DVD releases.