theoutcastrogue:

“Once, my husband told me of this man. He avenges our wrongs. And the bounty killers sure do tremble when he appears. They call him “Silence.” Because wherever he goes, the silence of death follows.”

Il grande silenzio (Italy/France 1968, dir. Sergio Corbucci)

• Story by : Sergio Corbucci
• Starring : Jean Louis Trintignant, Klaus Kinski, Vonetta McGee, Frank Wolff
  
• Music by : Ennio Morricone

The Great Silence is basically an anti-western. We’re beyond anti-heroes here (they’re already prevalent in spaghetti westerns), we’re poking holes through the genre itself and watching it bleed. It bleeds quite a lot.

There’s a hired killer, a sheriff and a banker; bounty hunters and outlaw men and women; and grieving revenge-seeking mothers, wives and brothers. But there’s no scorching sun on desert landscapes, there’s only the oppressive cold, dark, and snow of the Great Blizzard of 1899. (Although the year that gives us the proper historical context is the year of the film itself: 1968, shortly after the assassinations of Malcolm X and Che Guevara.)

There’s a strong and silent protagonist who is silent because he’s actually mute – and you’ll be amazed how much of a difference that makes – and whose pistol is not a revolver but a semi-automatic Mauser. There’s a shoot-out that’s not a duel (now that’s a fictional trope) but an unceremonious ambush (now that’s not fictional at all).

And there’s an ending that made 20th Century Fox to flat-out refuse to distribute the film in the US (it finally got a theatrical release in 2012), and made a moviegoer in Sicily to take out his gun and shoot the screen in fury.

One function of art is to keep us hopeful. Another is to keep us furious. And as far as I’m concerned, nothing will ever be and nothing should ever be as infuriating as cruelty and injustice done “all according to the law”.