Last month, TCM ran a spotlight on westerns, including a night of films that used the western genre to make social commentary on issues that were relevant at the time the movie was made. Among those movies was a spaghetti western that was new to me, The Great Silence. It's getting another airing on TCM not long after its first showing, tomorrow (June 12) at 10:15 PM as part of a salute to composer Ennio Morricone.
The movie is set in 1898, at a time when Utah was already a state, but since this is an Italo-French coproduction it gets all sorts of history wrong, including implying that much of the US west is still a territory. This is an exceptionally snowy winter, and people are having difficulty getting through the snow and having to resort to all sorts of things to survive.
Some men have become bounty hunters like the mute Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) or Loco (Klaus Kinski). But others are "outlaws" who don't seem to be quite so criminal and certainly aren't very well armed as we see at least one of them with a scythe. There are rumors that the new governor is going to institute an amnesty, with the implication that the outlaws ought to give themslves up. Loco, however, has a plan to kill a bunch of the outlaws who each have a small sum on their heads, although together they add up to something substantial.
The new sherif, Burnett (Frank Wolff), wants to do away with bounty hunting, while corrupt banker Pollicut wants it to continue because he's got the money to buy up the dead people's money, making a killing (pun intended) in the process. As for Silence, he's apart from the other bounty hunters, dishing out justice by being smart enough to make his victims always draw first, with his being a faster shot leading to his winning every fight.
Enter a widow of one of the outlaws killed. Pauline (Vonetta McGee) lost her husband and has the distinct feeling that her husband was set up precisely so they could get whatever modest property he had. She gets in touch with Silence, and offers him a substantial sum to get him to kill Loco. So Silence will be against Loco, while there's a third leg of the triangle in the form of those outlaws. Loco has also figured out a way to get rid of the sheriff. And then, in a series of flashbacks, we learn more about the relationships between these characters and why Silence and Loco wound up pitted against each other.
The Great Silence is one of those movies that has a good idea on paper, but doesn't come out quite right in the execution. I think part of that is that it's a spaghetti western with very few Americans involved, so the view of Americans is even more off than Hollywood's view of Europeans in the studio era (or the French view of Americans in Purple Noon). There's also, as I mentioned above, a lot of history that's off. But there's also the production style. The Great Silence was made in 1968, and director Sergio Corbucci makes ample use of the sort of zooms that filmmakers of that era began to use. This use of the camera, as well as the way Corbucci has his characters die "cinematically", doesn't really work as it's terribly distracting.
But perhaps it's also that the spaghetti western isn't my favorite genre. Having read up on The Great Silence, I noticed that the movie seems to have a cult following. I'm sorry to say that I don't quite get it. But if you do like spaghetti westerns, maybe you too will like The Great Silence.
No comments:
Post a Comment