Screen Gems The Great Silence
THE GREAT SILENCE, spaghetti Western, not rated, in Italian with subtitles, The Screen, 3.5 chiles
Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 Western The Great Silence is set in a desolate wintry outpost where honor and honesty are of little use. In fact, men and women who demonstrate those admirable qualities in this film tend to get shot. It is a place where outlaws may just be the good guys, where a woman seeking revenge has to hire a bounty hunter to kill other bounty hunters, and where a tin star draws contempt and bemusement rather than respect and fear. For all that, it is very much a sociopolitical Western, one where the rich and powerful force the weak and poor to break the laws so that they can, in turn, be exterminated — a form of socioeconomic cleansing that serves the better class of town folk.
But the better class are greedy businessmen, corrupt politicians, and amoral killers, and in Corbucci’s cinematic world, they are much less worthy than the homeless war veterans, ambushing bandits, and black people who populate the isolated town of Snow Hill, Utah. The time is 1899, and though the West may well be a-changing, old habits die hard.
The plot focuses on an African-American widow (a sensitive, determined turn by American actress Vonetta McGee) who hires a mute gunfighter (French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant) to kill the men who killed her husband. His name is Silence, and that’s what he brings to those who stand in his path: a great, infinite silence. His path crosses those of a cynical, soft-speaking killer (Klaus Kinski, terrifyingly delightful) and a pompous, well-meaning lawman (Frank Wolff, who brings a necessary comedic energy to the proceedings). They all inhabit a cold, bleak, frozen West where killing is just another job that needs doing.
It’s a picture very much of its time, and also of these times. Shot amid a period of civil unrest in both America and Europe and during the height of an unpopular war in Vietnam, Corbucci’s film was a sharp departure from the vast majority of spaghetti Westerns — including those made by the other Sergio, Leone — that had preceded it over the past four or five years. Rather than fill the screen with sometimes outlandish, often unbelievable characters and gunplay while recycling themes one could easily find in an American B Western, The Great
Silence speaks to a period of social unrest and political divide, suggesting that it is possible that the two sides will never be bridged without a lot of casualties.
Corbucci had served as a film critic, assistant director, and director of such superficial action films as Goliath and the Vampires before segueing into the Western genre with the equally superficial Massacre
at Grand Canyon (1964). But his next Western, the problematic but fascinating Minnesota Clay (1964) introduced the type of protagonist Corbucci gravitated toward: an ex-con slowly going blind who has one last job to do before his eyesight gives out.
Other physically flawed anti-heroes followed in both Corbucci’s Django ,in which the coffin-dragging title character still manages to do away with his enemies despite the fact that his gun hand is mangled, and The
Great Silence, which presents us with A Man With No Voice. “The idea of a disabled hero intrigued me, made certain solutions
more difficult, required more thinking and study, allowed for some coups de theatre,” Corbucci once explained.
Corbucci would go on to make other dark political Westerns, but for years he remained in the shadow of the better-known Leone, whose trilogy of pictures featuring The Man With No Name (Clint Eastwood) garnered box-office success, critical praise, and a cult following. “Leone’s characters may be cynical, but his films are boisterous and operatic,” said Emmy Award-winning screenwriter and film historian Kirk Ellis. “Corbucci’s are anything but that. A fatalism bordering on complete nihilism pervades his work.” Brent Kliewer, who oversees The Screen, agrees. “Leone was the [Giuseppe] Verdi of spaghetti Westerns. Corbucci was the Wes Craven or Tobe Hooper of spaghetti Westerns.”
Ellis sees Leone and Corbucci as operating in “two parallel strands of Italian Western filmmaking in the mid-to-late 1960s. American audiences are more familiar — and comfortable — with Leone’s grandiosity and ritualized violence. But filmmakers like Damiano Damiani, Tonino Valerii, Sergio Sollima, and especially Corbucci were attuned to the political currents sweeping over Europe, and their films are markedly more political. In that sense, Corbucci and the others were only doing what so many directors before them had done in America in the 1950s — namely, use the Western as a friendly vehicle to explore contemporary society.”
Shot in the Dolomite mountain range in Italy (unlike the perpetually sunny plains and sound stages of Spain, where many spaghetti Westerns were produced), The Great Silence made barely a dent at the box office and disappeared from sight for years. It never played in America until it recently resurfaced to play the art-house circuit, and it seems both fitting and sad that a film with this title could be the last offering that The Screen presents. The nearly 20-year-old cinematic art house is scheduled to shut down on Monday in anticipation of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design’s closing in a month or so. Kliewer is looking for ways to reopen The Screen sometime down the line. Let us hope the Silence, in this case, is just temporary. — Robert Nott