The Great Silence
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| The Great Silence | |
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 The Great Silence DVD cover |
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| Directed by | Sergio Corbucci |
| Written by | Mario Amendola Bruno Corbucci Sergio Corbucci Vittoriano Petrilli |
| Starring | Jean-Louis Trintignant Klaus Kinski Frank Wolff Vonetta McGee |
| Music by | Ennio Morricone |
| Release date(s) | 1969 |
| Running time | 105 min. |
| Language | Italian |
| IMDb profile | |
The Great Silence (Il Grande Silenzio, 1969), or The Big Silence, is an Italian spaghetti western. It is widely considered by critics as the masterpiece of director Sergio Corbucci and is one of his better known movies, along with Django (1966). Unlike most conventional and spaghetti westerns, The Great Silence takes place in the snow-filled landscapes of Utah.
The movie features a score by Ennio Morricone and stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as Silence, a mute gunfighter assisting a group of Mormons outlawed for their beliefs and a woman trying to avenge her husband. They are set against a group of bounty hunters, led by Loco (Klaus Kinski).
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[edit] Ending
The film is famous for its bleak ending, a bloodshed where everyone remotely good gets gunned down by the greedy bounty hunters. The director was forced to shoot an alternate ending for the North African market, where the hero's death in the end would've been deemed unacceptable.
The Fantoma DVD features the (silent) alternate "happy" ending with the comic sheriff played by Frank Wolff returning from the "dead" (he had sunk in a frozen lake) to save the day. It is unlikely that an English or Italian audio track was ever created for this ending.[1]
[edit] Background
The film was greatly inspired by two films: Day of the Outlaw (1959), directed by Andre De Toth and Black Sabbath (1963), directed by Mario Bava. Day of the Outlaw was a black-and-white western starring Robert Ryan and set in the snowbound town of Bitters, Wyoming, disrupted in the film by the arrival of seven outlaws on the run from the cavalry with a stolen army payroll. The segment from Bava's Black Sabbath titled 'Wurdulak' was also an inspiration for the film. "A nobleman, Count Vladimir D'Urfe (Mark Damon) discovers the headless corpse of Alibek (a Turkish bandit) in the snowbound mountains on his way to Yessey. He takes it to a nearby peasant house, where he finds a family living in fear. Their father, an old man named Gorka (Boris Karloff) has been hunting for the bandit for days and is due back at ten o'clock that night; Alibek is a wurdulak (a vampire): 'a cadaver always seeking blood'. If Gorka hasn't returned by the appointed hour, his family must kill him, as he has been vampirised too." The film also draws from the basic theme of A Fistful of Dollars (1964) in that there are "warring factions fighting over a town."
Reportedly, Jean-Louis Trintignant only agreed to play in a spaghetti western under the condition that he did not have to learn any lines for the role. That's why the main character conveniently became a mute in the story.[2]
[edit] Production
Location shooting took place near the ski resort of Cortina d'Ampezzo, in the Veneto region of northern Italy. It was also shot at Bracciano Lake, near Manziana in Lazio and the Elios town set in Rome was used for several of the Snow Hill scenes (including two nights sequences and the build-up to the final duel).
The scenes were shot at night so that the fake "snow" looked more convincing; shaving foam was used to give the street a snowbound look. For the daylight scenes, the Elios set was swathed in fog, to disguise the fact that the surrounding countryside had no snow.
[edit] Trivia
This was Vonetta McGee's film debut. She would later appear in Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984).
Silence's distinctive rapid-firing pistol is the 1896 9mm Mauser Broomhandle.
The only words Silence utters are as a boy, played in flashback by child actor Loris Loddi (from The Hills Run Red, 1966). As his mother is shot, he cries out, "Mamma! Mamma!", though the English dubbed voice is being reused from the final scene of Corbucci's Johnny Oro (1966).
Silence's horrific neck scar reappeared in Clint Eastwood's Hang 'Em High (1968), his American-made follow-up to the "Dollars" films. It is not known if Eastwood saw Silence before he made Hang 'Em High (he was in Europe in 1967 on promotional duty), but there are some startling similarities, in particular the scene in which Eastwood walks into a saloon, puts a cigar out in a villain's drink and pulls down his neckerchief to reveal a hanging scar; Silence reveals his scar in exactly the same way, to tell his victim his identity. Silence's Mauser pistol reappeared in Eastwood's Joe Kidd (1972), while the snowbound setting was used in Pale Rider (1985) and briefly in Unforgiven (1992); in the early Seventies there was even a rumor that Eastwood was going to remake The Big Silence.
[edit] References
- ^ DVD review at dvdtimes.co.uk. Retrieved on October 29, 2006.
- ^ The Great Silence review at thespinningimage.com. Retrieved on October 29, 2006.
