In 1898 in the wintry mountains of Utah, Loco and his gang of bounty-hunters are profiteers who deal in legalised murder. In the little town of Snow Hill however, they run into trouble in the shape of a mute avenging gunslinger known only as Silence ...
This is a fabulous, haunting, completely atypical spaghetti western made by the talented director of Django and Il Mercenario, which supplants all the conventions of the genre - the hero can't speak and uses a weird rapid-fire pistol (a C96 Mauser Broomhandle), sand is replaced by snow, there's an interracial romance, there's no macho posturing and the bad guys win. It's a real one of a kind. It has five great performances - Trintignant (who didn't speak English) as the mute hero, the unforgettable Kinski as the baddest bad man in the west (he makes even Gian Maria Volonte in Per Qualche Dollaro In Più look like a sweetheart), the little-seen McGee as the tragic Pauline (check her out in The Eiger Sanction and Repo Man), moustached Wolff (the doomed patriarch in C'era Una Volta Il West) as the likable sheriff and nasty Pistilli (the pious priest in Il Bueno Il Brutto Il Cattivo) as the corrupt magistrate. It's worth watching the movie alone just to look at Kinski and McGee's eyes. There's a wonderfully tender score by Ennio Morricone which poetically counterpoints the savagery and injustice, and an ending of such staggeringly downbeat heartlessness it undoubtedly contributed to the film's poor business and relative obscurity - criminally, it was never released in either the UK or the US. If you've only ever seen Sergio Leone's Italian westerns, it's well worth checking out some others (such as Damiano Damiani's Quién Sabe / A Bullet For The General or Sergio Sollima's La Resa Dei Conti / The Big Gundown), and don't miss this one. Alex Cox rates this the best spaghetti western ever made, and while I personally prefer the Leone films, it's a unique and brilliant movie which lingers long in the mind. An Italian-French co-production, shot in the exclusive Cortina D'Ampezzo Alpine region of the Dolomites. Just to make it even more obscure, English-language prints of this movie have two alternate titles - The Big Silence and The Great Silence.
This is a fabulous, haunting, completely atypical spaghetti western made by the talented director of Django and Il Mercenario, which supplants all the conventions of the genre - the hero can't speak and uses a weird rapid-fire pistol (a C96 Mauser Broomhandle), sand is replaced by snow, there's an interracial romance, there's no macho posturing and the bad guys win. It's a real one of a kind. It has five great performances - Trintignant (who didn't speak English) as the mute hero, the unforgettable Kinski as the baddest bad man in the west (he makes even Gian Maria Volonte in Per Qualche Dollaro In Più look like a sweetheart), the little-seen McGee as the tragic Pauline (check her out in The Eiger Sanction and Repo Man), moustached Wolff (the doomed patriarch in C'era Una Volta Il West) as the likable sheriff and nasty Pistilli (the pious priest in Il Bueno Il Brutto Il Cattivo) as the corrupt magistrate. It's worth watching the movie alone just to look at Kinski and McGee's eyes. There's a wonderfully tender score by Ennio Morricone which poetically counterpoints the savagery and injustice, and an ending of such staggeringly downbeat heartlessness it undoubtedly contributed to the film's poor business and relative obscurity - criminally, it was never released in either the UK or the US. If you've only ever seen Sergio Leone's Italian westerns, it's well worth checking out some others (such as Damiano Damiani's Quién Sabe / A Bullet For The General or Sergio Sollima's La Resa Dei Conti / The Big Gundown), and don't miss this one. Alex Cox rates this the best spaghetti western ever made, and while I personally prefer the Leone films, it's a unique and brilliant movie which lingers long in the mind. An Italian-French co-production, shot in the exclusive Cortina D'Ampezzo Alpine region of the Dolomites. Just to make it even more obscure, English-language prints of this movie have two alternate titles - The Big Silence and The Great Silence.