The Great Silence (1968)

Outside of Sergio Leone, this is probably my favourite spaghetti Western. It’s an unremittingly bleak story of a town terrorized by a gang of ruthless bounty hunters, who are able to kill thanks largely to a local banker/justice-of-the-peace putting up bounties for his own gain. The hero, “Silence” (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant), is hired by a recent widow (Vonetta McGee) of one of their victims. Silence operates from a long-standing grudge of his own, by goading bounty hunters into drawing so that he always kills in self-defence. Klaus Kinski is the head of the bounty hunter in a rare large role and does excellently, managing to portray the personification of amoral evil without overacting (which he often does elsewhere).

Obvious points of comparison are the 50s film Day of The Outlaw (another bleak western set in a snowbound town) and The Hateful Eight (the stagecoach scenes at the start of The Hateful Eight reminded me a lot of The Great Silence, I suspect deliberately). However, it also explores a key Western theme that many classic 50s Westerns (e.g. High Noon and Rio Bravo) touched on – the idea of “what can one lone hero do?”. In this case the answer turns out to be “not alot”. It also looks at the idea of the hero’s code of honour: here, Silence refuses to draw first, which provides him with legal protection for his killings but ultimately dooms him when he finds himself too injured to draw quickly. In contrast to, say, the classic Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott westerns, the villians here have no sense of the traditional “western honour” and exploit others’ trust in them ruthlessly. A final point of comparison is Sergio Corbucci’s own “Django” which features a similar ending with a hero struggling to shoot due to injured hands but a quite different outcome (once again, 50s American Westerns such as The Man From Laramie also used this device).

It’s obviously a great film, but it does have a few weaknesses: first, the English dub is probably of middling quality (neither great nor awful). Second, some of the plot relating to the Sherriff (Frank Wolff) doesn’t quite work. There’s clearly a deliberate point being made about a Sherriff who is somewhat ineffectual (both personally, and being hamstrung by legal technicality) but at times it veers into outright stupidity (e.g. punching the bars of a prison cell) which somewhat weakened the character.

In summary, an excellent film which takes a unique look at some classic Western themes in a way that only the Spaghetti Westerns really did. There are loads of different DVD versions of which I have the US Fantoma version which is now quite old and only comes with the English dub. It looks OK (although a few small scenes near the end are a little weaker) but it’s possible that other editions might now be better.

Pictures